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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Intergenerational Justice In The Hobbesian State Of Nature, Paola Manzini, Marco Mariotti, Roberto Veneziani
Intergenerational Justice In The Hobbesian State Of Nature, Paola Manzini, Marco Mariotti, Roberto Veneziani
Economics Department Working Paper Series
We analyse the issue of justice in the allocation of resources across generations. Our starting point is that if all generations have a claim to natural resources, then each generation should be entitled to exercise veto power on the unpalatable choices of the other generations. We analyse this situation as one of bargaining à la Rubinstein, Safra and Thomson [15], which incorporates a notion of justice as mutual advantage, rather than justice as impartiality, as in the Kantian-Rawlsian tradition. Our framework captures some key aspects of the interaction between isolated agents in a Hobbesian state of nature, in which agents …
Librarians And The Terrible Fix: Economics Of The Big Deal, Ted C. Bergstrom
Librarians And The Terrible Fix: Economics Of The Big Deal, Ted C. Bergstrom
Ted C Bergstrom
The academic journal market is characterized by delegated purchasing, unreliable signals of demand, and a complex, difficult-to-evaluate product. As a result, the demand for journals is highly inelastic to prices. Large commercial publishers have capitalized on this inelastic demand, by reducing competition through mergers and consolidations, by offering Big Deal bundled contracts, and raising their prices to levels far above average cost. We suggest that the demand for access to journal articles would be much more price elastic and the overall cost to the academic community would be lower if universities were to abstain from purchasing bundled site licenses at …
The Role Of Commitment In Bilateral Trade, Dino Gerardi, Johannes Hörner, Lucas Maestri
The Role Of Commitment In Bilateral Trade, Dino Gerardi, Johannes Hörner, Lucas Maestri
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper solves for the set of equilibrium payoffs in bargaining with interdependent values when the informed party makes all offers, as discounting vanishes. The seller of a good is informed of its quality, which affects both his cost and the buyer’s valuation, but the buyer is not. To characterize this payoff set, we derive an upper bound, using mechanism design with limited commitment. We then prove that this upper bound is tight, by showing that all its extreme points are equilibrium payoffs. Our results shed light on the role of different forms of commitment on the bargaining process. In …
The Role Of Commitment In Bilateral Trade, Dino Gerardi, Johannes Hörner, Lucas Maestri
The Role Of Commitment In Bilateral Trade, Dino Gerardi, Johannes Hörner, Lucas Maestri
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We examine the buyer-seller problem under different levels of commitment. The seller is informed of the quality of the good, which affects both his cost and the buyer’s valuation, but the buyer is not. We characterize the allocations that can be achieved through mechanisms in which, unlike with full commitment, the buyer has the option to “walk away” after observing a given offer. We further characterize the equilibrium payoffs that can be achieved in the bargaining game in which the seller makes all the offers, as the discount factor goes to one. This allows us to identify how different levels …
Exclusivity, Competition And The Irrelevance Of Internal Investment, Catherine De Fontenay, Joshua Gans, Vivienne Groves
Exclusivity, Competition And The Irrelevance Of Internal Investment, Catherine De Fontenay, Joshua Gans, Vivienne Groves
Catherine de Fontenay
This paper considers the effect of exclusive contracts on investment decisions in a market with two upstream and two downstream firms. Segal and Whinston’s (2000) irrelevance result is generalized and it is shown that exclusive contracts have no effect on the equilibrium level of internal investment for the contracted parties when competition exists in both the upstream and downstream markets. Furthermore, by considering a more competitive environment we are able to demonstrate that strongly internal investment by rival upstream-downstream bargaining pairs is similarly unaffected by the presence of exclusive contracts.