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Economic Theory

Series

2003

Articles 1 - 17 of 17

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics, Jonathan B. Wight Aug 2003

Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

Some economists consider their discipline a science, and thereby divorced from messy ethical details, the normative passions of right and wrong. They teach in a moral vacuum, perhaps even advocating economic agents' operating independently and avariciously, asserting that this magically produces the greatest good for society.

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The Film Industry Cluster Development Recommendations For Western Massachusetts, Center For Economic Development Jan 2003

The Film Industry Cluster Development Recommendations For Western Massachusetts, Center For Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

California is home to the world's largest movie clusters. It grew out of the need to extend beyond New York's confined environment. The opportunities that lay ahead were carefully planned and exploited. For Western Massachusetts to learn from this example it will have to discover a niche that can be marketed as truly worthy of attracting businesses away from established clusters. This will require a top-down approach from government bodies to ensure that a successful cluster fits wit the New England lifestyle. Current opportunities exist within factory towns that have available old mill buildings and infrastructure. Unfortunately the establishment of …

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Power, Privilege, And Special Interests: Rent Seeking And Subsidies In Agriculture, Matt Bogard Jan 2003

Power, Privilege, And Special Interests: Rent Seeking And Subsidies In Agriculture, Matt Bogard

Agriculture Department Seminar Series

This presentation covers what Public Choice economists refer to as ‘rent seeking,’ generally seeking favor or special privilege from government through subsidies or regulatory advantages. Particularly, the biotech industry is the area of focus for this presentation. Problems with rent seeking in the biotech industry involve less innovation and industry consolidation. Policies related to biotech regulation, school lunch programs, the Clean Air Act, and ethanol subsidies are discussed. A game theoretic approach is used and it is concluded that issues related to rent seeking and special interests are not adequately addressed by recent campaign finance reform efforts. Alternatives such as …

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The Political Economy Of Perverse Financial Liberalization: Examples From The Asian Crisis, Nancy Neiman Auerbach, Thomas D. Willett Jan 2003

The Political Economy Of Perverse Financial Liberalization: Examples From The Asian Crisis, Nancy Neiman Auerbach, Thomas D. Willett

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

Debates continue to rage about the causes of recent currency and financial crises around the globe and their implications for the desirability of domestic and international financial liberalization. Beneath the heated exchanges of the most vocal disputants, a quiet consensus is beginning to emerge among serious scholars and policy officials. The big lesson from these crises is that while financial liberalization is still a desirable goal, it must be approached very carefully. It’s not just that without the proper pre-conditions liberalization will not provide full benefits. The results can sometimes be disastrous. What was once considered to be an arcane …

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The Rise And Demise Of The Technology-Specific Approach To The First Amendment, Christopher S. Yoo Jan 2003

The Rise And Demise Of The Technology-Specific Approach To The First Amendment, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

This article examines how analytical, technological, and doctrinal developments are forcing the courts to reconsider their media-specific approach to assessing the constitutionality of media regulation. In particular, it offers a comprehensive reevaluation of the continuing validity of the Broadcast Model of regulation, which contains features, such as licensing and direct content regulation, that normally would be considered paradigmatic violations of the First Amendment. Specifically, the analysis assesses the theoretical coherence of the traditional justification for extending a lesser degree of First Amendment protection to broadcasting than to other media (i.e., the physical scarcity of the electromagnetic spectrum) as well as …

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Incentive Compatibility In Multi-Unit Auctions, Sushil Bikhchandani, Shurojit Chatterji, Arunava Sen Jan 2003

Incentive Compatibility In Multi-Unit Auctions, Sushil Bikhchandani, Shurojit Chatterji, Arunava Sen

Research Collection School Of Economics

We characterize incentive compatibility in multi-unit auctions with multi-dimensional types. An allocation mechanism is incentive compatible if and only if it is nondecreasing in marginal utilities (NDMU). The notion of incentive compatibility we adopt is dominant strategy in private value models and ex post incentive compatibility in models with interdependent values. NDMU is the following requirement: if changing one buyer’s type, while keeping everyone else’s types the same, changes this buyer’s allocation then the new allocation must be relatively more attractive (or relatively less unattractive) to this buyer. We also establish a price characterization of incentive compatible mechanisms.

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The Evolution Of Human Life Expectancy And Intelligence In Hunter-Gatherer Economies, Hillard Kaplan Jan 2003

The Evolution Of Human Life Expectancy And Intelligence In Hunter-Gatherer Economies, Hillard Kaplan

ESI Publications

The economics of hunting and gathering must have driven the biological evolution of human characteristics, since hunter-gatherer societies prevailed for the two million years of human history. These societies feature huge intergenerational resource flows, suggesting that these resource flows should replace fertility as the key demographic consideration. It is then theoretically expected that life expectancy and brain size would increase simultaneously, as apparently occurred during our evolutionary history. The brain here is considered as a direct form of bodily investment, but also crucially as facilitating further indirect investment by means of learning-by-doing.

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Emotion And Financial Markets, Lucy F. Ackert, Bryan K. Church, Richard Deaves Jan 2003

Emotion And Financial Markets, Lucy F. Ackert, Bryan K. Church, Richard Deaves

Faculty and Research Publications

No abstract provided.

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Converted Or Unconverted: To Whom Do We Preach?, Amy L. Wax Jan 2003

Converted Or Unconverted: To Whom Do We Preach?, Amy L. Wax

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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Rethinking The Commitment To Free, Local Television, Christopher S. Yoo Jan 2003

Rethinking The Commitment To Free, Local Television, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

One of the most enduring tenets of U.S. television policy has been the commitment to localism. I suggest that the FCC's localism policy can be disaggregated into four, more specific commitments: (1) the preference for locally oriented over nationally oriented programming, (2) the preference for free (i.e., advertising-supported) over pay television, (3) the preference for single-channel over multi-channel television technologies, and (4) the preference for incumbents over new entrants and new technologies. I then analyze each of these commitments in light of what is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the television industry, which is the fact that its cost …

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Access To Networks: Economic And Constitutional Connections, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo Jan 2003

Access To Networks: Economic And Constitutional Connections, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

A fundamental transformation is taking place in the basic approach to regulating network industries. Policy makers are in the process of abandoning their century-old commitment to rate regulation in favor of a new regulatory approach known as access regulation. Rather than controlling the price of outputs, the new approach focuses on compelling access to and mandating the price of inputs. Unfortunately, this shift in regulatory policy has not been met with an accompanying shift in the manner in which regulatory authorities regulate prices. Specifically, policy makers have continued to base rates on either historical or replacement cost. We argue that …

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Immigration And The Workplace: Immigration Restrictions As Employment Discrimination, Howard F. Chang Jan 2003

Immigration And The Workplace: Immigration Restrictions As Employment Discrimination, Howard F. Chang

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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Of Property And Anti-Property, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky Jan 2003

Of Property And Anti-Property, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

Private property is widely perceived as a potent prodevelopment and anticonservationist force. The drive to accumulate wealth through private property rights is thought to encourage environmentally destructive development; legal protection of such property rights is believed to thwart environmentally friendly public measures. Indeed, property rights advocates and environmentalists are generally described as irreconcilable foes. This presumed clash often leads environmentalists to urge public acquisition of private lands. Interestingly, less attention is paid to the possibility that the government may prove no better a conservator than private owners. Government actors often mismanage conservation properties, collaborating with private developers to dispose of …

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Rjvs In Product Innovation And Cartel Stability, Luca Lambertini, Sougata Poddar, Dan Sasaki Jan 2003

Rjvs In Product Innovation And Cartel Stability, Luca Lambertini, Sougata Poddar, Dan Sasaki

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We characterise the interplay between firms' decision in product development undertaken through a research joing venture (RJV), and the nature of their ensuing market behaviour. Participant firms in an RJV face a trade-off between saving the costs of product innovation by developing similar products to one another, e.g. by sharing most of the basic components of their products, and investing higher initial efforts in product innovation in order to develop more distinct products. We prove that the more the fims' products are distinct and thus less substitutable, the easier their collusion is to sustain in the marketing supergame, either in …

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Excess Capacity: A Note, Sougata Poddar Jan 2003

Excess Capacity: A Note, Sougata Poddar

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

In a two period model of strategic entry deterrence where the incumbent firm moves before the entrant by installing capacity for production, Dixit (1980) argued that in a (perfect) equilibrium excess capacity would not be observed, contradicting Spence's (1977) result on the same issue. In this note, we show that Dixit may not always remain true when we allow for demand uncertainty.

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Getting Off The Dole: Why The Court Should Abandon Its Spending Doctrine And How A Too-Clever Congress Could Provoke It To Do So, Mitchell N. Berman Jan 2003

Getting Off The Dole: Why The Court Should Abandon Its Spending Doctrine And How A Too-Clever Congress Could Provoke It To Do So, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley And Accounting: Rules Versus Principles Versus Rents, William W. Bratton Jan 2003

Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley And Accounting: Rules Versus Principles Versus Rents, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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