Production externalities: internalization by voting

We study internalization of production externalities in perfectly competitive markets where production plans are decided by majority voting. Since shareholders want firms to maximize dividends of portfolios rather than profits, they are interested in some internalization. Two governances, namely the shareholder governance (one share, one vote) and the stakeholder democracy (one stakeholder, one vote), are compared. We argue that perfect internalization is more likely to be the outcome of the stakeholder democracy than the shareholder governance

Scheduling with opting out: improving upon random priority

In a scheduling problem where agents can opt out, we show that the familiar Random Priority (RP) a rule can be improved upon by another mechanism dubbed Probabilistic Serial (PS). Both mechanisms are nonmanipulable in a strong sense, but the latter is Pareto superior to the former and serves a larger (expected number of agents. The PS equilibrium outcome is easier to compute than the RP outcome; on the other hand RP is easier to implement than PS. We show that the improvement of PS over RP is significant but small: at most a couple of percentage points in the relative welfare gain and the relative difference in quantity served. We conjecture that the latter never exceeds 8.33 %. Both gains vanish when the number of agents is large

Schop s’invite à la Nuit de la lecture

In this paper, the existence of unemployment is partly explained as being the result of coordination failures. It is shown that as a result of self-fulfilling pessimistic expectations, even at Walrasian prices, a continuum of equilibria results, among which an equilibrium with approximately no trade and a Walrasian equilibrium. These coordination failures also arise at other price systems, but then unemployment is the result of both a wrong price system and coordination failures. Some properties of the set of equilibria are analyzed. Generically, there exists a continuum of non-indifferent equilibrium allocations. Under a condition implied by gross substitutability, there exists a continuum of equilibrium allocations in the neighborhood of a competitive allocation, when prices are Walrasian. For a specialized economy, a dynamic illustration is offered. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V All rights reserved

Separate aggregation of beliefs and values under ambiguity

International audienceMaximin expected utility model for individual decision making under ambiguity prescribes that the individual posits independently a utility function and a set of probability distributions over events to represent the values and belief, respectively. It assumes that individual evaluates each act on the basis of its minimum expected utility over this class of distributions. In this paper, we attempt to generalize the model to social decision making. It is assumed that the society’s belief is formed through a linear aggregation of individual beliefs and society’s values through a linear aggregation of individual values. We propose principles which characterize such separate aggregation procedures. We also generalize Choquet expected utility model, which posits a nonadditive measure over events and a utility function to represent belief and values, respectively. We prove that the only aggregation procedures that respect our principles are the separate linear aggregations of beliefs and value