Locating Two Public Bads in an Interval

Public bads are facilities that are necessary for the whole society, but unfortunately, entail negative externalities for the social-economic welfare in the surrounding areas. The main objective of the present thesis is to find optimal locations of two public bads in a region given the preferences of two agents located there. Based on lexmin preference as the joint preference of each of the agents for locating pairs of public bads, the present thesis has defined and proved eleven lemmas determining the implications of strategy-proofness, anonymity and unanimity properties on the decision rule. As an extension to the traditional approach, this thesis has determined complete characterization of a set of strategy-proof, anonymous and unanimous rules, and shows that combination of these properties allows for inner solutions for optimal locations of two public bads in an interval given the preferences of the agents in the region

Locating an Optimal Site for a Controversial Facility

We consider a situation in which policymakers in a local community have to choose an optimal site for a controversial and essential project in a democratic setting. Policymakers have either single-dipped or multi-dipped preferences over a Euclidean space of possible locations. We provide two existence results for this issue. There exists at most two optimal sites if the size of policymakers is odd, and they have single-dipped preferences over a one-dimensional site space

Strategy-proof location of public bads in a two-country model

We consider the joint decision of placing public bads in each of two neighboring countries, modeled by two adjacent line segments. Residents of the two countries have single-dipped preferences, determined by the distance of their dips to the nearer public bad (myopic preferences) or, lexicographically, by the distance to the nearer and the other public bad (lexmin preferences). A (social choice) rule takes a profile of reported preferences as input and assigns the location of the public bad in each country. For the case of myopic preferences, all rules satisfying strategy-proofness, country-wise Pareto optimality, non-corruptibility, and the far away condition are characterized. These rules pick only border locations. The same holds for lexmin preferences under strategy-proofness and country-wise Pareto optimality alone. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Strategy-proof location of public bads in a two-country model

We consider the joint decision of placing public bads in each of two neighboring countries, modelled by two adjacent line segments. Residents of the two countries have single-dipped preferences, determined by the location of the nearest public bad to their dips. A social choice function or rule takes a profile of reported preferences as input and assigns the location of the public bad in each country. All rules satisfying strategy-proofness, country-specific Pareto optimality, non-corruptibility, and the far away condition are characterized. These rules pick only boundary locations

Experimental Evidence on the Multibidding Mechanism

Pérez-Castrillo and Wettstein (2002) and Veszteg (2004) propose the use of a multibidding mechanism for situations where agents have to choose a common project. Examples are decisions involving public goods (or public "bads"). We report experimental results to test the practical tractability and effectiveness of the multibidding mechanisms in environments where agents hold private information concerning their valuation of the projects. The mechanism performed quite well in the laboratory: it provided the ex post efficient outcome in roughly three quarters of the cases across the treatments; moreover, the largest part of the subject pool formed their bids according to the theoretical bidding behavior.experiments, mechanisms, uncertainty

Mechanisms for division problems with single-dipped preferences

A mechanism allocates one unit of an infinitely divisible commodity among agents reporting a number between zero and one. Nash, Pareto optimal Nash, and strong equilibria are analyzed for the case where the agents have single-dipped preferences. One of the main results is that when the mechanism is anonymous, monotonic, standard, and order preserving, then the Pareto optimal Nash and strong equilibria coincide and assign Pareto optimal allocations that are characterized by so-called maximal coalitions: members of a maximal coalition prefer an equal coalition share over obtaining zero, whereas the outside agents prefer zero over obtaining an equal share from joining the coalition

Economic Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility.

What is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and how can we explain the phenomenon from an economic perspective? Is there a business case for CSR and was Milton Friedman right when writing in the New York Times in 1970 that "the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits"? Chapter 1 of this thesis will address all these questions and create a coherent conceptual framework for further analysis in the subsequent chapters. In this function it will serve as a natural introduction to the economics of CSR. One of the main issues emerging from the literature on CSR is the need to identify and explore a new kind of classical dichotomy, i.e. the trade o¤ between market provision of public goods via CSR and its public counterpart via regulation. The two theoretical essays that follow will focus on novel and potentially unexpected interaction between ?rm strategy and classical regulation in light of CSR and imperfect information, thereby suggesting the need to revise and eventually adapt the traditional use of public policy or to think about completely new policy tools.Social responsibility of business; Corporate governance;