In incomplete information environments with transferable utility, efficient outcomes are generally implementable unless interim or ex post participation constraints are imposed on the problem. In this paper we show that linking a sufficiently large number of independent but possibly unrelated social decisions, a slightly perturbed Groves mechanism can implement an efficient outcome with probability arbitrarily close to one, while respecting all participation, incentive and balanced budget constraints.
We advance a novel choice-theoretic model of “identity” based on the notions of categories and narratives. Identity is conceived as a matter of “reflexive perception” — how people understand themselves. Choosing an identity is equivalent to making a generalization about one’s past that highlights the most salient aspects of experience. When many individuals make a common choice in this regard, they embrace a collective identity which is dysfunctional if it is Pareto dominated by an alternative self-classificatory schema. Using a simple multi-stage risk sharing game, we explore conditions under which dysfunctional collective identities might be expected to emerge.
We empirically implement a dynamic structural model of labor supply and welfare program participation for agents with potentially time-inconsistent preferences. Using panel data on the choices of single women with children from the NLSY 1979, we provide estimates of the degree of time-inconsistency, and of its influence on the welfare take-up decision. With these estimates, we conduct counterfactual experiments to quantify the utility loss stemming from the inability to commit to future decisions, and the potential utility gains from commitment mechanisms such as welfare time limits and work requirements.
Keywords: Time inconsistent preferences, Welfare reform, Labor supply
This paper studies the role of bundling in the efficient provision of excludable public goods. We show that bundling in the provision of unrelated public goods can enhance social welfare. With a large number of goods and agents, first best can be approximated with pure bundling. For a parametric class of problems with binary valuations, we characterize the optimal mechanism, and show that bundling alleviates the free riding problem in large economies and decreases the extent of use exclusions. Both results are related to the idea that bundling makes it possible to reduce the incidence of exclusions because the variance in the relevant valuations decreases.
Commodity bundling is studied in an environment where the dispersion of valuations unambiguously decreases when two or more goods are sold as a bundle only. Bundling is more likely to dominate separately selling the goods if marginal costs are low relative to the average valuation, or if the distribution of valuations is very peaked around the mean.
This paper studies the optimal provision mechanism for multiple excludable public goods when agents’ valuations are private information. For a parametric class of problems with binary valuations, we characterize the optimal mechanism, and show that it involves bundling. Bundling alleviates the free riding problem in large economies in two ways: first, it can increase the asymptotic provision probability of socially efficient public goods from zero to one; second, it decreases the extent of use exclusions.
Keywords: Public Goods Provision; Bundling; Exclusion
We interpret workers’ confidence in their own skills as their morale, and investigate the implication of worker overconfidence on the firm’s optimal wage-setting policies. In our model, wage contracts both provide incentives and affect worker morale, by revealing private information of the firm about worker skills. We provide conditions for the non-differentiation wage policy to be profit-maximizing. In numerical examples, worker overconfidence is a necessary condition for the firm to prefer no wage differentiation, so as to preserve some workers’ morale; the non-differentiation wage policy itself breeds more worker overconfidence; finally, wage compression is more likely when aggregate productivity is low.
We consider parametric examples of two-bidder private value auctions in which each bidder observes her own private valuation as well as noisy signals about her opponent’s private valuation. In such multidimensional private value auction environments, we show that the revenue equivalence between the first and second price auctions breaks down and there is no definite revenue ranking; while the second price auction is always efficient allocatively, the first price auction may be inefficient and the inefficiency may increase as the signal becomes more informative; equilibria may fail to exist for the first price auction. We also show that auction mechanisms provide different incentives for bidders to acquire costly information about opponents’ valuation.
Keywords: Multidimensional auctions, Revenue equivalence, Allocative efficiency, Information acquisition