Partial privatization and environmental policies

The paper compares emission tax and emission quota in a mixed duopoly when the partial privatization of a public firm is allowed. Furthermore, we consider the following two cases with regard to the objective of the public firm: (1) the public firm maximizes the weighted average of its profit and wefare and (2) the public firm maximizes the weighted average of its profit and the sum of consumer surplus and producer surplus. We show that emission tax is welfare superior to emission quota regardless of the degree of partial privatization in (1), whereas the former is inferior to the latter when the degree of partial privatization is high in (2).environment; mixed duopoly; quota; tax

Price Competition in a Mixed Duopoly

We analyze sequential and simultaneous price setting under a mixed duopoly with homogeneous products and symmetric quadratic cost functions. When public firm is the follower, there exists the case that the equilibrium price is highest of all timings.

"Voice Matters in a Dictator Game"

We examine a dictator game with a "voice" option in the laboratory. In our experiment, the recipient has an opportunity to state a payoff-irrelevant request for the minimum acceptable offer before the dictator dictates his/her offer. In this game, it is predicted not only by the standard game theory, but by the behavioral game theory such as theories of other-regarding preferences, that the dictator's offer is independent of the recipient's request. Some findings based on our data are as follows: the above independence hypothesis is rejected; as the recipient's request increases, the dictator's offer increases when the requests are less than 50% of the pie; on the other hand, when the request goes beyond 50% of the pie, the offer decreases as the request increases. That is, "voice" matters in a dictator game. We also conduct a clustering analysis to classify dictators' behaviour into some notable patterns. As a result, we obtain the following three behavioural patterns: the other-disregarding, the punishing the greedy, and the lenient.

Partial privatization and environmental policies

The paper compares emission tax and emission quota in a mixed duopoly when the partial privatization of a public firm is allowed. Furthermore, we consider the following two cases with regard to the objective of the public firm: (1) the public firm maximizes the weighted average of its profit and wefare and (2) the public firm maximizes the weighted average of its profit and the sum of consumer surplus and producer surplus. We show that emission tax is welfare superior to emission quota regardless of the degree of partial privatization in (1), whereas the former is inferior to the latter when the degree of partial privatization is high in (2)