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Selected Works

Ted C Bergstrom

Articles 61 - 76 of 76

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

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 …

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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.

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When Is A Man's Life Worth More Than His Human Capital?, Ted Bergstrom Oct 1982

When Is A Man's Life Worth More Than His Human Capital?, Ted Bergstrom

Ted C Bergstrom

This paper develops a "subjectivist" theory of the value that individuals place on risks to their lives. It explains the paradox that although individuals may view their lives as priceless, they still will take small risks for a finite amount of money. Typical public projects that alter risks to life result in small changes in survival probability for a large number of people. Standard tools of benefit cost can therefore be applied, where statistical lives saved are valued at a price equal to the marginal rate of substitution between survival probability and wealth. This "value" is compared to human capital …

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Gorman And Musgrave Are Dual: An Antipodean Theorem On Public Goods, Ted Bergstrom, Richard Cornes Jun 1981

Gorman And Musgrave Are Dual: An Antipodean Theorem On Public Goods, Ted Bergstrom, Richard Cornes

Ted C Bergstrom

This paper finds the conditions under which an allocation branch can determine the efficient amount of public goods to produce, independently of the distribution of private goods. The result is similar to that found in our Econometrica paper, but uses a quite different method--solving a differential equation.

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Efficiency-Inducing Taxation For A Monopolistically Supplied Depletable Resource, Ted Bergstrom, John Cross, Dick Porter Jun 1981

Efficiency-Inducing Taxation For A Monopolistically Supplied Depletable Resource, Ted Bergstrom, John Cross, Dick Porter

Ted C Bergstrom

We show that for a depletable resource, if the competitive time path of prices is known, and if the profit function is concave, then there is an easily described time path of taxes and/or subsidies that would induce a monopolist to follow an efficient time path of extraction.

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When Does Majority Rule Supply Public Goods Efficiently?, Ted Bergstrom Dec 1978

When Does Majority Rule Supply Public Goods Efficiently?, Ted Bergstrom

Ted C Bergstrom

H.R. Bowen showed that if voters have equal tax shares and if marginal rates of substitution are symmetrically distributed, then majority voting leads to efficient provision of public goods. These conditions are not likely to apply in a community with asymmetric income distribution. This paper defines a new idea for public goods allocation, a "pseudo-Lindahl equilibrium" which combines majority voting with tax rates that depend on income and other observable characteristices in such a way that the majority rule outcome is Pareto optimal for an interesting class of societies. The informational requirements for implementing pseudo-Lindahl are much less stringent than …

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An Economic Approach To Social Choice Ii, Ted C. Bergstrom, Trout Rader Dec 1977

An Economic Approach To Social Choice Ii, Ted C. Bergstrom, Trout Rader

Ted C Bergstrom

No abstract provided.

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Collective Choice And The Lindahl Allocation Method, Ted Bergstrom Jun 1976

Collective Choice And The Lindahl Allocation Method, Ted Bergstrom

Ted C Bergstrom

This paper contains a proof of the existence of Lindahl equilibrium in a very general model of externalities, public goods, and non-selfish preferences. The trick in this paper is to treat all goods as pure public goods, with private goods and their competitive prices treated as special cases induced by special structure within the public goods, Lindahl framework.

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How To Discard Free Disposability--At No Cost, Ted Bergstrom Dec 1975

How To Discard Free Disposability--At No Cost, Ted Bergstrom

Ted C Bergstrom

This paper shows how to prove the existence of competitive equilibrium without assuming either monotonic preferences or free disposability--and without adding any new assumptions.

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The Existence Of Maximal Elements And Equilibria In The Absence Of Transitivity, Ted Bergstrom Aug 1975

The Existence Of Maximal Elements And Equilibria In The Absence Of Transitivity, Ted Bergstrom

Ted C Bergstrom

This paper generalizes results of Ky Fan and Hugo Sonnenschein on the existence of maximal elements for non-transitive binary relations. It proves a generalization of Nash's theorem on the existence of non-cooperative equilibrium. It also shows that existence of competitive equilibrium can be proved as a consequence of the existence of a maximal element for an appropriately chosen binary relation.

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The Core When Strategies Are Restricted By Law, Ted Bergstrom Mar 1975

The Core When Strategies Are Restricted By Law, Ted Bergstrom

Ted C Bergstrom

The alpha-core is defined to be the set of feasible allocations such that no coalition can do better for its members by selecting alternative strategies given “worst-case” assumptions about the behavior of other players. This paper explores the way that the alpha-core of a game is affected by restrictions on the legally admissible strategies of the players. It also explores the relation between Lindahl equilibrium and alpha-cores with suitable restrictions on strategies.

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Competitive Equilibrium Without Transitivity, Monotonicity, Or Free Disposal, Ted Bergstrom Dec 1973

Competitive Equilibrium Without Transitivity, Monotonicity, Or Free Disposal, Ted Bergstrom

Ted C Bergstrom

This paper shows how to relax several of the standard assumptions used to prove the existence of competitive equilibrium. I thought it was more interesting than the referees did. Some of the ideas in this paper appear in my other papers on general equilibrium.

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On Efficient Provision Of Social Overhead Goods, Ted Bergstrom Dec 1972

On Efficient Provision Of Social Overhead Goods, Ted Bergstrom

Ted C Bergstrom

This paper was my attempt to build a theory of "public factors of production" such as scientific knowledge and to see whether there is any way that Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium theory can cope with the nonconvexities that arise. I propose that the economy might be partitioned into provision of "social overhead goods" and ordinary goods in such a way that given the quantities of social overhead goods, the remaining activities satisfy the assumptions needed for the existence of competitive equilibrium. I proposed and examined a notion of "Lindahl-Hotelling equilibrium" in which individuals were assigned Lindahl prices for the social overhead …

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Interrelated Consumer Preference And Voluntary Exchange, Ted Bergstrom Feb 1971

Interrelated Consumer Preference And Voluntary Exchange, Ted Bergstrom

Ted C Bergstrom

This paper presents a model of interrelated preferences for pairs of individuals. It investigates the possibility of an equilibrium with voluntary transactions. It identifies the puzzling case of two people who disagree because each wants the other to have the better part and shows that if this is assumed away, then there exists a competitive equilibrium with voluntary bilateral gifts.

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A Scandinavian Consensus Solution For Efficient Income Distribution Among Nonmalevolent Consumers, Ted Bergstrom Nov 1970

A Scandinavian Consensus Solution For Efficient Income Distribution Among Nonmalevolent Consumers, Ted Bergstrom

Ted C Bergstrom

If Persons A and B are both benevolent to C, then a gift from A to C also benefits B. Thus C's income is like a public good to A and B. What happens with lots of people whose affections are entangled? This paper shows that a "distributional Lindahl equilibrium" exists and leads to an efficient income redistribution.

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Human Capital In An Economic Growth Model, Ted C. Bergstrom Aug 1967

Human Capital In An Economic Growth Model, Ted C. Bergstrom

Ted C Bergstrom

This is my Stanford Ph D thesis. It incorporates "human capital" into an economic growth model. Human capital accumulates because it is a luxury consumption good.

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