The fragmented Lok Sabha: a case for electoral engineering

Where there are numerous small political parties, as in India, the electoral system neither reflects the true views and opinions on important social and economic issues nor does it incorporate “social inclusiveness” . The fragmentation in our legislature can be corrected through appropriate electoral engineering. This study is an attempt to do so. It describes how the composition of the Lok Sabha has changed since 1967, paying particular attention to the trends in indices of fragmentation. It also discusses issues relating to the “ideal” composition of a legislature and of a government

Some Remarks on the Ranking of Infinite Utility Streams

A long tradition in welfare economics and moral philosophy, dating back at least to Sidgwick(1907) is the idea that all generations must be treated alike. Perhaps, the most forceful assertion of this idea comes from Ramsey (1928) who declared that any argument for preferring one generation over another must come “merely from the weakness of the imagination”. The “equal treatment of all generations” or the intergenerational equity principle has been formalised in the subsequent literature as the axiom of Anonymity, which requires that two infinite utility streams be judged indifferent to one another if one can be obtained from the other through a permutation of utilities of a finite number of generations. Since it also seems “natural” to require that any social evaluation of infinite utility streams respond positively to an increase in the utility of any generation, the Pareto Axiom is also desirable. Unfortunately, Diamond(1965) showed that there is no social welfare function satisfying these axioms along with a continuity axiom. In a more recent paper, Basu and Mitra( 2003) prove a more general result by showing that the continuity axiom is superfluous

Cost monotonicity, consistency and minimum cost spanning tree games

We propose a new cost allocation rule for minimum cost spanning tree games. The new rule is a core selection and also satisfies cost monotonicity. We also give characterization theorems for the new rule as well as the much-studied Bird allocation. We show that the principal difference between these two rules is in terms of their consistency properties

Markets with bilateral bargaining and incomplete information

We study the relationship between bargaining and competition with incomplete information. We consider a model with two uninformed and identical buyers and two sellers. One of the sellers has a privately-known reservation price, which can either be Low or High. The other seller’s reservation price is commonly known to be in between the Low and High values of the privately-informed seller. Buyers move in sequence, and make offers with the second buyer observing the offer made by the first buyer. The sellers respond simultaneously. We show that there are two types of (perfect Bayes) equilibrium. In one equilibrium, the buyer who moves second does better. In the second equilibrium, buyers’ expected payoffs are equalised, and the price received by the seller with the known reservation value is determined entirely by the equuilibrium of the two-player game between a single buyer and an informed seller. We also discuss extensions of the model to multiple buyers and sellers, and to the case where both sellers are privately informed

Correlated equilibria, incomplete information and coalitional deviations

This paper proposes new concepts of strong and coalition-proof correlated equilibria where agents form coalitions at the interim stage and share information about their recommendations in a credible way. When players deviate at the interim stage, coalition-proof correlated equilibria may fail to exist for two-player games. However, coalition-proof correlated equilibria always exist in dominance-solvable games and in games with positive externalities and binary actions

Communication networks with endogenous link strength

This paper analyzes the formation of networks when players choose how much to invest in each relationship. We suppose that players have a fixed endowment that they can allocate across links, and in the baseline model, suppose that link strength is an additively separable and convex function of individual investments, and that agents use the path which maximizes the product of link strengths. We show that both the stable and efficient network architectures are stars. However, the investments of the hub may differ in stable and efficient networks. Under alternative assumptions on the investment technology and the reliability measure, other network architectures can emerge as efficient and stable

Large Phase of B_s-\bar B_s Mixing in Supersymmetric Grand Unified Theories

We consider the possibility of a large phase of B_s-\bar B_s mixing in supersymmetric SU(5) and SO(10) models. We find that in the SU(5) model, the magnitude of this phase is correlated with the branching ratio of \tau -> \mu\gamma and the phase can be within 2\sigma of the recent UTfit analysis. In the case of SO(10) models, this correlation can be relaxed and a large phase can be obtained. In this scenario, a non-zero value of CP asymmetry for B -> X_s\gamma will be predicted. We predict the sparticle mass ranges for the LHC for these models once the UTfit result is accommodated and discuss the dark matter and the anomalous magnetic moment constraints on this analysis.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Enhancement of Br(B_d -> mu^+mu^-)/Br(B_s -> mu^+mu^-) in Supersymmetric Unified Models

We explain the 2.3 sigma deviation in the recent measurements of the neutral B mesons decay into muon pairs from the standard model prediction in the framework of supersymmetric grand unified models using anti-symmetric coupling as a new source of flavor violation. We show a correlation between the B_d -> mu^+mu^- decay and the CP phase in the B_d -> J/psi K decay and that their deviations from the standard model predictions can be explained after satisfying constraints arising from various hadronic and leptonic rare decay processes, B-bar{B}, K-bar{K} oscillations data and electric dipole moments of electron and neutron. The allowed parameter space is typically represented by pseudoscalar Higgs mass m_A < 1 TeV and tan beta_H (= {v_u}/{v_d}) < 20 for squark and gluino masses around 2 TeV.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Nash implementation with partially honest individuals

We investigate the problem of Nash implementation in the presence of "partially honest" individuals. A partially honest player is one who has a strict preference for revealing the true state over lying when truthtelling does not lead to a worse outcome (according to preferences in the true state) than that which obtains when lying. We show that when there are at least three individuals, the presence of even a single partially honest individual (whose identity is not known to the planner) can lead to a dramatic increase in the class of Nash implementable social choice correspondences. In particular, all social choice correspondences satisfying No Veto Power can be implemented. We also provide necessary and sufficient conditions for implementation in the two-person case when there is exactly one partially honest individual and when both individuals are partially honest. We describe some implications of the characterization conditions for the two-person case. Finally, we extend our three or more individual result to the case where there is an individual with an arbitrary small but strictly positive probability of being partially honest