9,417 research outputs found
Social Preferences and the Efficiency of Bilateral Exchange
Under what conditions do social preferences, such as altruism or a concern for fair outcomes, generate efficient trade? I analyze theoretically a simple bilateral exchange game: Each player sequentially takes an action that reduces his own material payoff but increases the other player’s. Each player’s preferences may depend on both his/her own material payoff and the other player’s. I identify necessary conditions and sufficient conditions on the players’ preferences for the outcome of their interaction to be Pareto efficient. The results have implications for interpreting the rotten kid theorem, gift exchange in the laboratory, and gift exchange in the field
Fairness in overloaded parallel queues
Maximizing throughput for heterogeneous parallel server queues has received
quite a bit of attention from the research community and the stability region
for such systems is well understood. However, many real-world systems have
periods where they are temporarily overloaded. Under such scenarios, the
unstable queues often starve limited resources. This work examines what happens
during periods of temporary overload. Specifically, we look at how to fairly
distribute stress. We explore the dynamics of the queue workloads under the
MaxWeight scheduling policy during long periods of stress and discuss how to
tune this policy in order to achieve a target fairness ratio across these
workloads
The American dream or nightmare? Understanding the change in perceptions of the American dream
The American Dream remains at the heart of many Americans’ national identity, and is a major theme throughout entertainment and news media, most significantly throughout political elections. It is an ideal uniquely able to ignite emotion in Americans and is something that connects people around the country, while also used as a tactic by politicians because of its impact. Since its origin, though, there has been a decline in belief in the American Dream, specifically among millennials, with growing pessimism in the amount of opportunity there really is in the United States for all. This pessimism is thoroughly explored through the studies of various authors beginning in the 1950s, and also through data conducted this past year asking respondents across the country a variety of questions regarding their sentiments on economic opportunity and American Dream. Through the usage of variables such as age, party identification, opinion on the news, and more, the change in perceptions of the American Dream is examined and uncovered
Analysis of Probabilistic Basic Parallel Processes
Basic Parallel Processes (BPPs) are a well-known subclass of Petri Nets. They
are the simplest common model of concurrent programs that allows unbounded
spawning of processes. In the probabilistic version of BPPs, every process
generates other processes according to a probability distribution. We study the
decidability and complexity of fundamental qualitative problems over
probabilistic BPPs -- in particular reachability with probability 1 of
different classes of target sets (e.g. upward-closed sets). Our results concern
both the Markov-chain model, where processes are scheduled randomly, and the
MDP model, where processes are picked by a scheduler.Comment: This is the technical report for a FoSSaCS'14 pape
Contractual Federalism and Strategy-proof Coordination
This paper takes a mechanism design approach to federalism and assumes that local preferences are the private information of local jurisdictions. Contractual federalism is defined as a strategy-proof contract among the members of the federation supervised by a benevolent but not omniscient federal authority. We show that even if the size of the information to be elicited is minimal, the incentive compatibility constraint has a bite in terms of flexibility and welfare. Strategy-proof and efficient federal mechanisms are necessarily uniform. There exists inefficient and non-uniform strategy-proof mechanisms, but they are socially worse than non cooperative decentralization. Federal mechanisms which are neutral and robust to coalition manipulations are equivalent to voting rules on uniform policies.Federalism, Asymmetric Information, Strategy-proofness, Externality, Coordination, Uniformity. JEL Classification Numbers: D71, D72, D82, H77
A Community Microgrid Architecture with an Internal Local Market
This work fits in the context of community microgrids, where members of a
community can exchange energy and services among themselves, without going
through the usual channels of the public electricity grid. We introduce and
analyze a framework to operate a community microgrid, and to share the
resulting revenues and costs among its members. A market-oriented pricing of
energy exchanges within the community is obtained by implementing an internal
local market based on the marginal pricing scheme. The market aims at
maximizing the social welfare of the community, thanks to the more efficient
allocation of resources, the reduction of the peak power to be paid, and the
increased amount of reserve, achieved at an aggregate level. A community
microgrid operator, acting as a benevolent planner, redistributes revenues and
costs among the members, in such a way that the solution achieved by each
member within the community is not worse than the solution it would achieve by
acting individually. In this way, each member is incentivized to participate in
the community on a voluntary basis. The overall framework is formulated in the
form of a bilevel model, where the lower level problem clears the market, while
the upper level problem plays the role of the community microgrid operator.
Numerical results obtained on a real test case implemented in Belgium show
around 54% cost savings on a yearly scale for the community, as compared to the
case when its members act individually.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figure
Distributional Preferences, Reciprocity-Like Behavior, and Efficiency in Bilateral Exchange
Under what conditions do distributional preferences, such as altruism or a concern for fair outcomes, generate efficient trade? I analyze theoretically a simple bilateral exchange game: each player sequentially takes an action that reduces his own material payoff but increases the other player’s. Each player’s preferences may depend on both his/her own material payoff and the other player’s. I identify two key properties of the second-mover’s preferences: indifference curves kinked around “fair” material-payoff distributions, and materials payoffs entering preferences as “normal goods.” Either property can drive reciprocity-like behavior and generate a Pareto efficient outcome
On the Value of Participation: Endogenous Emergence of Social Norms in a Three-Player Ultimatum Game
We report results from two different settings of a 3-player ultimatum game. Under the monocratic rule, a player is randomly selected to make an offer to two receivers. Under the democratic rule, all three players make a proposal, and one proposal is then extracted. A majority vote is required to implement the proposal. Although the two rules are strategically equivalent, different patterns of behaviour seem to emerge as the number of interactions increase. Under the monocratic rule proposers seem to be entitled to claim a larger share of the pie, and receivers more likely to accept, in comparison with the democratic rule. We speculate that ‘institutions’ allowing more participation in the process of collective choice lead to more ‘socially responsible’ behaviour in the players.Majority ultimatum; participation; institutions; social norms
Preferences for Redistribution
This paper discusses what determines the preferences of individuals for redistribution. We review the theoretical literature and provide a framework to incorporate various effects previously studied separately in the literature. We then examine empirical evidence for the US, using the General Social Survey, and for a large set of countries, using the World Values Survey. The paper reviews previously found results and provides several new ones. We emphasize, in particular, the role of historical experiences, cultural factors and personal history as determinants of preferences for equality or tolerance for inequality.preferences for redistribution
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