93,564 research outputs found
Public Choice and the Economic Analysis of Anarchy: A Survey
Public choice economists began studying the economics of anarchy in the 1970s. Since then, the amount of research on anarchy has burgeoned. This article surveys the important public choice contributions to the economics of anarchy. Following the lead of the early public choice economists, many current economists are researching and analyzing how individuals interact without government. From their non-public-interested explanations of the creation of government law enforcement to their historical studies of attempts to internalize externalities under anarchy, public choice scholars are arriving at a more realistic perspective on government and how people interact when government law enforcement is lacking. Although the economics of politics often receives more attention, the economics of anarchy is an important area of research in public choice.Anarchism; Lawlessness; Order; Internalization of Externalities; Self-Governance
Public choice and the economic analysis of anarchy: a survey
Public choice economists began studying the economics of anarchy in the 1970s. Since then, the amount of research on anarchy has burgeoned. This article surveys the important public choice contributions to the economics of anarchy. Following the lead of the early public choice economists, many current economists are researching and analyzing how individuals interact without government. From their non-ublic-interested explanations of the creation of government law enforcement to their historical studies of attempts to internalize externalities under anarchy, public choice scholars are arriving at a more realistic perspective on government and how people interact when government law enforcement is lacking. Although the economics of politics often receives more attention, the economics of anarchy is an important area of research in public choice.anarchism; lawlessness; order; internalization of externalities; self-governance
Bottleneck Routing Games with Low Price of Anarchy
We study {\em bottleneck routing games} where the social cost is determined
by the worst congestion on any edge in the network. In the literature,
bottleneck games assume player utility costs determined by the worst congested
edge in their paths. However, the Nash equilibria of such games are inefficient
since the price of anarchy can be very high and proportional to the size of the
network. In order to obtain smaller price of anarchy we introduce {\em
exponential bottleneck games} where the utility costs of the players are
exponential functions of their congestions. We find that exponential bottleneck
games are very efficient and give a poly-log bound on the price of anarchy:
, where is the largest path length in the
players' strategy sets and is the set of edges in the graph. By adjusting
the exponential utility costs with a logarithm we obtain games whose player
costs are almost identical to those in regular bottleneck games, and at the
same time have the good price of anarchy of exponential games.Comment: 12 page
Hierarchy and Anarchy in Quark Mass Matrices, or Can Hierarchy Tolerate Anarchy?
The consequences of adding random perturbations (anarchy) to a baseline
hierarchical model of quark masses and mixings are explored. Even small
perturbations of the order of 5% of the smallest non-zero element can already
give deviations significantly affecting parameters of the
Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix, so any process generating the anarchy
should in general be limited to this order of magnitude. The regularities of
quark masses and mixings thus appear to be far from a generic feature of
randomness in the mass matrices, and more likely indicate an underlying order.Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX, 3 figures, to be submitted to Phys. Lett. B.
Abstract and Introduction changed to better reflect conclusion
The origins of governments: from anarchy to hierarchy
We analyze development trajectories of early civilizations where population size and technology are endogenous, and derive conditions under which such societies optimally ‘switch’ from anarchy to hierarchy – when it is optimal to elect and support a ruler. The ruler provides an efficient level of law and order, but creams off part of society's surplus for his own consumption. Switching to hierarchy occurs if the state of technology exceeds a threshold value, but societies may also be ‘trapped’ at lower levels of technology, perpetuating conditions of anarchy. We present empirical evidence based on the Standard Cross Cultural Sample that support the model's main predictions
Non-clairvoyant Scheduling Games
In a scheduling game, each player owns a job and chooses a machine to execute
it. While the social cost is the maximal load over all machines (makespan), the
cost (disutility) of each player is the completion time of its own job. In the
game, players may follow selfish strategies to optimize their cost and
therefore their behaviors do not necessarily lead the game to an equilibrium.
Even in the case there is an equilibrium, its makespan might be much larger
than the social optimum, and this inefficiency is measured by the price of
anarchy -- the worst ratio between the makespan of an equilibrium and the
optimum. Coordination mechanisms aim to reduce the price of anarchy by
designing scheduling policies that specify how jobs assigned to a same machine
are to be scheduled. Typically these policies define the schedule according to
the processing times as announced by the jobs. One could wonder if there are
policies that do not require this knowledge, and still provide a good price of
anarchy. This would make the processing times be private information and avoid
the problem of truthfulness. In this paper we study these so-called
non-clairvoyant policies. In particular, we study the RANDOM policy that
schedules the jobs in a random order without preemption, and the EQUI policy
that schedules the jobs in parallel using time-multiplexing, assigning each job
an equal fraction of CPU time
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