Sanctions

Sanctions are measures that one party (the sender) takes to influence the actions of another (the target). Sanctions, or the threat of sanctions, have been used, for example, by creditors to get a foreign sovereign to repay debt or by one government to influence the human rights, trade, or foreign policies of another government. Sanctions can harm the sender as well as the target. The credibility of such sanctions is thus at issue. We examine, in a game-theoretic framework, whether sanctions that harm both parties enable the sender to extract concessions. We find that they can, and that their thrust alone can suffice when they are contingent on the target's subsequent behavior. Even when sanctions are not used in equilibrium, however, how much compliance they can extract typically depends upon the coats that they would impose on each party.

Threats and Promises

Global environmental concerns have increased the sensitivity of governments and other parties to the actions of those outside their national jurisdiction. Parties have tried to extend influence extraterritorially both by promising to reward desired behavior and by threatening to punish undesired behavior. If information were perfect, the Coase theorem would suggest that either method of seeking influence could provide an efficient outcome. If the parties in question have incomplete information about each other's costs and benefits from different actions, however, either method can be costly, both to those seeking influence and in terms of overall efficiency. We compare various methods of seeking influence. A particular issue is dissembling: taking an action to mislead the other party about the cost or benefit of that action. By creating an incentive to dissemble, attempts to influence another's behavior can have the perverse effect of actually encouraging the action that one is trying to discourage.

Preemptive Entry in Differentiated Product Markets

Models of spatial competition are typically static, and exhibit multiple free-entry equilibria. Incumbent firms can earn rents in equilibrium because any potential entrant expects a significantly lower market share (since it must fit into a niche between incumbent firms) along with fiercer price competition. Previous research has usually concentrated on the zero-profit equilibrium, at which there is normally excessive entry, and so an entry tax would improve the allocation of resources. At the other extreme, the equilibrium with the greatest rent per firm normally entails insufficient entry, so an entry subsidy should be prescribed. A model of sequential firm entry (with an exogenous order of moves) resolves the multiplicity problem but raises a new difficulty: firms that enter earlier can expect higher spatial rents, and so firms prefer to be earlier in the entry order. This tension disappears when firms can compete for entry positions. We therefore suppose that firms can commit capital early to the market in order to lay claim to a particular location. This temporal competition dissipates spatial rents in equilibrium and justifies the sequential move structure. However, the policy implications are quite different once time is introduced. An atemporal analysis of the sequential entry process would prescribe an entry subsidy, but once proper account is taken of the entry dynamics, a tax may be preferable.Product differentiation, rent dissipation, entry deterrence, entry timing, sequential entry

A Beautiful Blonde: a Nash coordination game

In a memorable scene from the …lm ”A Beautiful Mind,” John Nash explains to his friends how to direct their attentions to women in a bar. Game theorists who have seen the …lm point out that the proposed solution is not a Nash equilibrium. Here we determine the Nash equilibria to the attention game. The symmetric mixed strategy equilibrium has resembles a common property resource problem. It has perverse comparative static properties that are not borne out by experimental data. Finally, we discuss alternative ways of formulating the game.coordination, Nash equilibrium, mixed strategy equilibrium, common property resource problem, comparative statics.

Market Provision of Public Goods: The Case of Broadcasting,”

Abstract This paper presents a theory of the market provision of broadcasting and uses it to address the nature of market failure in the industry. Advertising levels may be too low or too high, depending on the relative sizes of the nuisance cost to viewers and the expected benefits to advertisers from contacting viewers. Market provision may allocate too few or too many resources to programming and these resources may be used to produce programs of the wrong type. Monopoly may produce a higher level of social surplus than competition and the ability to price programming may reduce social surplus. JEL Classification: D43, L13, L8

Signalling with Many Signals.

This paper examines a market with asymmetric information where there are many signals available and where both the costs of signaling and the product value may depend on many privately known characteristics. Under a weak condition on the relationship between the marginal cost of increasing the signals and the product value, a separating set exists whereby the value of every seller's product is inferred from the seller's optimal choice of signals. The separating set constructed is Pareto dominant and corresponds to recently proposed equilibrium notions in signaling and screening models. Copyright 1987 by The Econometric Society.

Long-term care and family bargaining

We present a structural model of how families decide who should care for elderly parents. We use data from the National Long-Term Care Survey to estimate and test the parameters of the model. Then we use the parameter estimates to simulate the effects of the existing long-term trends in terms of the common but untested explanations for them. Finally, we simulate the effects of alternative family bargaining rules on individual utility to measure the sensitivity of our results to the family decision-making assumptions we make

Intertemporal Price Competition.

Alternating price competition between firms selling differentiated products to nonhomogeneous consumers can yield two different types of equilibria. One, which we call "disciplined," arises when products are close substitutes. Another, which we call "spontaneous," emerges when products are more differentiated. In disciplined equilibria, an implicit threat to cut price further, in response to an initial price cut, supports quite collusive outcomes, which become less collusive as product differentiation increases. In spontaneous equilibria, no such threat is needed. Consumers in the smaller market tend to pay a higher price, as do consumers served by the more efficient firm. Copyright 1990 by The Econometric Society.