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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Independence Of Allocative Efficiency From Distribution In The Theory Of Public Goods, Ted Bergstrom, Richard Cornes Oct 1983

Independence Of Allocative Efficiency From Distribution In The Theory Of Public Goods, Ted Bergstrom, Richard Cornes

Ted C Bergstrom

When is the Pareto optimal amount of public goods independent of income distribution? Subject to some regularity conditions, the answer is when preferences of every individual i can be represented by a utility function of the form U(X_i,Y)=A(Y)X_i+B_i(Y) where X_i is i's consumption of private goods and Y is the amount of public goods.


Can Courtship Be Cheatproof?, Ted Bergstrom, Richard Manning Jun 1983

Can Courtship Be Cheatproof?, Ted Bergstrom, Richard Manning

Ted C Bergstrom

In 1983, I told Richard Manning about Gale and Shapley's beautiful 1962 paper on matching. He asked whether in the Gale-Shapley it was in the interest of all participants to tell the truth. We rather quickly showed that in general it is not in the interest of the recipients of offers to be truthful. In fact we were able to show that no mechanism can guarantee efficient assignments and be cheatproof. We were very pleased. We sent it to a journal, only to learn that Al Roth had beat us to it in a paper that was to appear in …


Counting Groves-Ledyard Equilibria Via Degree Theory, Ted Bergstrom, Carl Simon, Charles Titus Jan 1983

Counting Groves-Ledyard Equilibria Via Degree Theory, Ted Bergstrom, Carl Simon, Charles Titus

Ted C Bergstrom

A Nash equilibria of the Groves-Ledyard mechanism is Pareto optimal. But this may not be much use if there are many distinct Nash equilibria, since it is not clear that the mechanism would converge on any one of them. This paper shows that if preferences are quasi-linear, the Groves-Ledyard mechanism has a unique Nash equilibrium, but even in the simplest class of preferences in which demands for public goods are affected by incomes, the number of equilibria increases exponentially with the number of consumers. The paper makes use of some pretty mathematics and even sports a drawing of Whitney's umbrella.