Hasil untuk "econ.TH"

Ashwin Kambhampati

A central challenge in mechanism design is to identify mechanisms whose performance is robust under uncertainty about the environment. The maxmin optimality criterion is commonly used for this purpose, but it often yields a large and economically uninformative set of mechanisms. This paper proposes a lexicographic approach to refining the maxmin criterion and characterizes the efficiency of optimal mechanisms. In canonical screening and auction environments, the strongest refinement $\unicode{x2013}$ proper robustness $\unicode{x2013}$ selects ex post efficient mechanisms. By contrast, in a public good provision environment, it identifies the precise form of optimal inefficiencies, which become severe in large economies.

Rui Sun

A principal with cheap capital optimally forces her counterparty to borrow at above-market rates. The reason: the form of finance is a screening device. Advances provide liquidity but pool types; contingent transfers separate types, but, because they are not pledgeable, impose financing costs. The optimal contract preserves outside-finance exposure to maintain screening power. Two sufficient statistics pin down the optimal advance share. With complementary counterparties, a uniform subsidy that cheapens finance across every relationship can reduce the value of each. This explains the coexistence of early payment and contingent compensation in trade credit, venture capital, and internal capital markets.

Marco LiCalzi, M. Alperen Yasar

A vocabulary is a list of words designating subsets from a grand set X. We model a vocabulary as a partition of X and study the aggregation of individual vocabularies into a collective one. We characterize aggregation rules when X is linearly ordered and each word of the vocabulary spans an order interval. We allow for individual vocabularies to differ both in the number and in the span of their words. Under a suitable restriction on agents' preferences, we show that our aggregation rules are strategy-proof.

D. Carlos Akkar

I study the optimal voting mechanism for a committee that must decide whether to enact or block a policy of unknown benefit. Information can come both from committee members who can acquire it at cost, and a strategic lobbyist who wishes the policy to be enacted. I show that the dictatorship of the most-demanding member is a dominant voting mechanism: any other voting mechanism is (i) less likely to enact a good policy, (ii) more likely to enact a bad policy, and (iii) burdens each member with a greater cost of acquiring information.

Florian Brandl, Andrew Mackenzie

A perfectly divisible cake is to be divided among a group of agents. Each agent is entitled to a share between zero and one, and these entitlements are compatible in that they sum to one. The mediator does not know the preferences of the agents, but can query the agents to make cuts and appraise slices in order to learn. We prove that if one of the entitlements is irrational, then the mediator must use a protocol that involves an arbitrarily large number of queries in order to construct an allocation that respects the entitlements regardless of preferences.

Georgy Lukyanov

When does reputation make experts play it safe, and what policy reverses that? I isolate a single lever - visibility of outcomes. In a two-page model with binary signals and outcomes, I show: (i) with an uninformative safe option and symmetric visibility, career concerns alone do not generate conservatism; (ii) increasing failure visibility (as in Registered Reports) weakens high-reputation caution and relaxes selection. I provide a necessary-and-sufficient local sign test, agnostic about utility curvature and allowing informative safe actions, and an identification map suitable for staggered RR adoption.

David Ellerman

This paper surveys and generalizes the main valuation formulas used in real estate valuation and presents unified proofs. The results are otherwise scattered in obscure journals and books while the proofs are rarely available to researchers in the field. The material was originally developed so that it could be used by mathematically-trained appraisers and researchers in the former Soviet Union and in other transition economies that were starting their real estate valuation profession. Keywords: real estate valuations; six functions of one; Ellwood, Akerson, and Hoskold formulas; capitalization rate methods; amortization tables JEL: G12, R3

Marcin Pęski, Colin Stewart

A researcher wants to ask a decision-maker about a belief related to a choice the decision-maker made; examples include eliciting confidence or cognitive uncertainty. When can the researcher provide incentives for the decision-maker to report her belief truthfully without distorting her choice? We identify necessary and sufficient conditions for nondistortionary elicitation and fully characterize all incentivizable questions in three canonical classes of problems. For these problems, we show how to elicit beliefs using variants of the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism.

Xiaoyu Cheng

Cheng (2025) establishes that in a persuasion game where both the sender and the receiver have Maxmin Expected Utility (MEU) preferences, the sender never strictly benefits from using ambiguous communication strategies over standard (non-ambiguous) ones. This note extends the analysis to environments with prior ambiguity, i.e., pre-existing ambiguity about the payoff-relevant state, and shows that, in the binary state and binary action case, the same no-gain result continues to hold.

Niccolò Urbinat, Marco LiCalzi

We study competitive equilibria in exchange economies when a continuum of goods is conflated into a finite set of commodities. The design of conflation choices affects the allocation of scarce resources among agents, by constraining trading opportunities and shifting competitive pressures. We demonstrate the consequences on relative prices, trading positions, and welfare.

Pietro Dall'Ara

This paper studies the persuasion of a receiver who accesses information only if she exerts costly attention effort. A sender designs an experiment to persuade the receiver to take a specific action. The experiment affects the receiver's attention effort, that is, the probability that she updates her beliefs. Persuasion has two margins: an extensive (effort) and an intensive (action). The receiver's utility exhibits a supermodularity property in information and effort. By leveraging this property, we establish an equivalence between experiments and persuasion mechanisms à la Kolotilin et al.~(2017). In applications, the sender's optimal strategy involves censoring favorable states.

R. Pablo Arribillaga, Agustin G. Bonifacio

In the problem of fully allocating an infinitely divisible commodity among agents whose preferences are single-peaked, we show that the uniform rule is the only allocation rule that satisfies efficiency, the equal division guarantee, consistency, and non-obvious manipulability.

Ludvig Sinander

I revisit the standard moral-hazard model, in which an agent's preference over contracts is rooted in costly effort choice. I characterise the behavioural content of the model in terms of empirically testable axioms, and show that the model's parameters are identified. I propose general behavioural definitions of relative (over)confidence and optimism, and characterise these in terms of the parameters of the moral-hazard model. My formal results are rooted in a simple but powerful insight: that the moral-hazard model is closely related to the well-known 'variational' model of choice under uncertainty.

Samidh Pal

This paper presents a new nested production function that is specifically designed for analyzing capital and labor intensity of manufacturing industries in developing and developed regions. The paper provides a rigorous theoretical foundation for this production function, as well as an empirical analysis of its performance in a sample of industries. The analysis shows that the production function can be used to accurately estimate the level of capital and labor intensity in industries, as well as to analyze the capacity utilization of these industries.

Orhan Aygün, Bertan Turhan

The over-and-above choice rule is the prominent selection procedure to implement affirmative action. In India, it is legally mandated to allocate public school seats and government job positions. This paper presents an axiomatic characterization of the over-and-above choice rule by rigorously stating policy goals as formal axioms. Moreover, we characterize the deferred acceptance mechanism coupled with the over-and-above choice rules for centralized marketplaces.

Dimitri Migrow

We study learning by privately informed forward-looking agents in a simple repeated-action setting of social learning. Under a symmetric signal structure, forward-looking agents behave myopically for any degrees of patience. Myopic equilibrium is unique in the class of symmetric threshold strategies, and the simplest symmetric non-monotonic strategies. If the signal structure is asymmetric and the game is infinite, there is no equilibrium in myopic strategies, for any positive degree of patience.

Michael H. Freedman

The paper describes a funding mechanism called Quadratic Finance (QF) and deploys a bit of calculus to show that within a very clean and simple linear model QF maximizes social utility. They differentiate the social utility function. The mathematical content of this note is that by taking one further derivative, one may also deduce that QF is the unique solution.

Nail Kashaev, Victor Aguiar

We present a novel characterization of random rank-dependent expected utility for finite datasets and finite prizes. The test lends itself to statistical testing using the tools in Kitamura and Stoye (2018).

David Walker-Jones

This paper uses an axiomatic foundation to create a new measure for the cost of learning that allows for multiple perceptual distances in a single choice environment so that some events can be harder to differentiate between than others. The new measure maintains the tractability of Shannon's classic measure but produces richer choice predictions and identifies a new form of informational bias significant for welfare and counterfactual analysis.

Pablo A. Neme, Jorge Oviedo

For a many-to-one matching market where firms have strict and $\boldsymbol{q}$-responsive preferences, we give a characterization of the set of strongly stable fractional matchings as the union of the convex hull of all connected sets of stable matchings. Also, we prove that a strongly stable fractional matching is represented as a convex combination of stable matchings that are ordered in the common preferences of all firms.