43,480 research outputs found
Privatization with Political Constraints: Auctions versus Private Negotiations
This paper investigates the design of privatization mechanisms in emerging market
economies characterized by political constraints that limit the set of viable privatization mechanisms. Our objective is to explain the striking diversity of privatization mechanisms observed in practice and the frequent use of an apparently suboptimal privatization mechanism: private negotiations. We develop a simple model wherein privatization is to be carried out by a government agent who plays favorites among bidders and is potentially disciplined by forthcoming elections. We find that it is the degree of political constraints that determines which mechanism is more successful in raising funds. If the political environment is such that the privatization agent himself aims at raising the fair value for the company, then privatization auctions and private
negotiations are equally successful in raising public revenues. If, however, political constraints distort the agentâs incentives, then one mechanism outperforms the other. In particular, if the distortion is moderate, then private negotiations can raise more value for a successful enterprise
than privatization auctions. In this case the agent may play favorites among the bidders, but to the extent he cares about the price, he will use his bargaining power to negotiate his target price. If, however, the distortion is severe so that the agent lacks sufficient motivation to raise a fair
price for the company, then privatization auctions will outperform private egotiations. Even though the agent may play favorites among the bidders, he would not put pressure on the bidders to raise the price during negotiations. In an auction, in contrast, the presence of other bidders,
regardless how informed they are, induces competition and places a lower bound on the
equilibrium winning bid. We also show that information disclosure laws may have negative welfare implications: they may help the privatization agent to collude with some of the bidders to the disadvantage of non-colluding bidders. Our theory provides further regulatory implications for privatization procedures in emerging market economies
Learning to Reach Agreement in a Continuous Ultimatum Game
It is well-known that acting in an individually rational manner, according to
the principles of classical game theory, may lead to sub-optimal solutions in a
class of problems named social dilemmas. In contrast, humans generally do not
have much difficulty with social dilemmas, as they are able to balance personal
benefit and group benefit. As agents in multi-agent systems are regularly
confronted with social dilemmas, for instance in tasks such as resource
allocation, these agents may benefit from the inclusion of mechanisms thought
to facilitate human fairness. Although many of such mechanisms have already
been implemented in a multi-agent systems context, their application is usually
limited to rather abstract social dilemmas with a discrete set of available
strategies (usually two). Given that many real-world examples of social
dilemmas are actually continuous in nature, we extend this previous work to
more general dilemmas, in which agents operate in a continuous strategy space.
The social dilemma under study here is the well-known Ultimatum Game, in which
an optimal solution is achieved if agents agree on a common strategy. We
investigate whether a scale-free interaction network facilitates agents to
reach agreement, especially in the presence of fixed-strategy agents that
represent a desired (e.g. human) outcome. Moreover, we study the influence of
rewiring in the interaction network. The agents are equipped with
continuous-action learning automata and play a large number of random pairwise
games in order to establish a common strategy. From our experiments, we may
conclude that results obtained in discrete-strategy games can be generalized to
continuous-strategy games to a certain extent: a scale-free interaction network
structure allows agents to achieve agreement on a common strategy, and rewiring
in the interaction network greatly enhances the agents ability to reach
agreement. However, it also becomes clear that some alternative mechanisms,
such as reputation and volunteering, have many subtleties involved and do not
have convincing beneficial effects in the continuous case
Threads: Newsletter of the Clean Clothes Campaign No. 26
This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.CCC_Threads_27.pdf: 192 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020
Judicial Intervention in the Contract of Employment: Some Reflections on Labour Adjudication in India
Not available
Theories of Fairness and Reciprocity
Most economic models are based on the self-interest hypothesis that assumes that all people are exclusively motivated by their material self-interest. In recent years experimental economists have gathered overwhelming evidence that systematically refutes the self-interest hypothesis and suggests that many people are strongly motivated by concerns for fairness and reciprocity. Moreover, several theoretical papers have been written showing that the observed phenomena can be explained in a rigorous and tractable manner. These theories in turn induced a new wave of experimental research offering additional exciting insights into the nature of preferences and into the relative performance of competing theories of fairness. The purpose of this paper is to review these recent developments, to point out open questions, and to suggest avenues for future research
Applications of negotiation theory to water issues
The authors review the applications of noncooperative bargaining theory to waterrelated issues-which fall in the category of formal models of negotiation. They aim to identify the conditions under which agreements are likely to emerge and their characteristics, to support policymakers in devising the"rules of the game"that could help obtain a desired result. Despite the fact that allocation of natural resources, especially trans-boundary allocation, has all the characteristics of a negotiation problem, there are not many applications of formal negotiation theory to the issue. Therefore, the authors first discuss the noncooperative bargaining models applied to water allocation problems found in the literature. Key findings include the important role noncooperative negotiations can play in cases where binding agreements cannot be signed; the value added of politically and socially acceptable compromises; and the need for a negotiated model that considers incomplete information over the negotiated resource.Water Supply and Sanitation Governance and Institutions,Town Water Supply and Sanitation,Water and Industry,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water Conservation
Play Fair at the Olympics
CCC_playfairovertimeolympicreporteng.pdf: 253 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020
- âŠ