Congressional Devolution of Immigration Policymaking: A Separation of Powers Critique

For roughly a decade, federal legislation has devolved to the states some of Congress\u27s authority to adopt immigration policies that discriminate against permanent resident aliens. Equal protection challenges to discriminatory state policies so authorized by Congress raise the knotty issue of the appropriate scope of judicial review. Courts remain divided. The source of the difficulty is that the equal protection congruence principle is not applicable to alienage discrimination. Unlike equal protection cases throughout most of constitutional law, the judiciary deploys different standards of judicial review in alienage discrimination cases depending on whether the discrimination arises under federal or state law. Applying a highly deferential standard of review, courts normally uphold congressionally enacted immigration policies discriminating against aliens. By contrast, courts normally invoke strict judicial scrutiny to find state alienage discrimination unlawful. Congressional devolution legislation authorizing states to adopt policies that discriminate against aliens spawn equal protection challenges that do not fit neatly into either category of judicial review: the controversies entail state alienage discrimination but the discrimination being challenged is congressionally authorized. Devolution presents the question whether Congress should be able to immunize the states from strict judicial scrutiny by authorizing the states to adopt discriminatory immigration policies that Congress could itself adopt. That question is the subject of this Article

Trade in bilateral oligopoly with endogenous market formation

We study a strategic market game in which traders are endowed with both a good and money and can choose whether to buy or sell the good. We derive conditions under which a non-autarkic equilibrium exists and when the only equilibrium is autarky. Autarky is ‘nice’ (robust to small perturbations in the game) when it is the only equilibrium, and ‘very nice’ (robust to large perturbations) when no gains from trade exist. We characterize economies where autarky is nice but not very nice; that is, when gains from trade exist and yet no trade takes place

Joint Production Games with Mixed Sharing Rules

We study Nash equilibria of joint production games under a mixed output sharing rule in which part of the output (the mixing parameter) is shared in proportion to inputs and the rest according to exogenously determined shares. This rule includes proportional sharing and equal sharing as special cases. We show that this game has a unique equilibrium and discuss comparative statics. When the game is large, players unanimously prefer the same value of the mixing parameter: the equilibrium value of the elasticity of production. For this value, equilibrium input and output are fully efficient. Our approach exploits the fact that payoffs in the joint production game are a function only of a player's input and the aggregate input and has indepen-dent interest as it readily extends to other "aggregative games".Production externalities, non-cooperative games

WEAK LINKS, GOOD SHOTS AND OTHER PUBLIC GOOD GAMES: BUILDING ON BBV

We suggest an alternative way of analyzing the canonical Bergstrom-Blume-Varian model of non-cooperative voluntary contributions to a public good that avoids the proliferation of dimensions as the number of players is increased. We exploit this approach to analyze models in which the aggregate level of public good is determined as a more general social composition function of individual gifts – specifically, as a generalized CES form – rather than as an unweighted sum as well as the weakest-link and best-shot models suggested by Hirshleifer. In each case, we characterize the set of equilibria, in some cases establishing existence of a unique equilibrium as well as briefly pointing out some interesting comparative static properties. We also study the weakest-link and best-shot limits of the CES composition function and show how the former can be used for equilibrium selection and the latter to show that equilibria of some better-shot games are identical to those of the much simpler best-shot game.non cooperative games, public goods, weakest links, best shots

Dissipation in Rent-seeking Contests with Entry Costs

This paper considers the extent to which expenditure by contestants in imperfectly discriminating rent-seeking contests dissipates all or only part of the rent. In particular, we investigate strategic effects, technological effects and asymmetry under an assumption of diminishing returns to scale. Although asymmetry can reduce dissipation when there are few contestants, we show that this effect disappears in the Nash equilibria of large contests. Similarly, strategic effects are diminished if the cost of entry, which restricts the number of contestants, is fully taken into account. When individual entry costs fall to zero, the reduction in dissipation arising from technological factors is entirely eliminated in the limit. More generally, the dissipation-reducing properties of all three effects operating simultaneously disappear as individual entry fees fall to zero provided the aggregate cost of entry is added to the expenditure of entrants. These conclusions are robust to details of the entry process which can be sequential, in which case the ordering is irrelevant to the limiting results, or simultaneous. Our principal theoretical tool is the share function which expresses the probability of a player winning the contest as a function of aggregate expenditure. However, this methodology has independent interest as it can be applied in many other contexts (not formally analyzed here).Non-cooperative games, rent-seeking, rent dissipation, entry costs

Joint Production Games with Mixed Sharing Rules

We study joint production games under a mixed sharing rule in which part of the ouput (the mixing parameter) is shared in proportion to inputs and the rest according to exogenously determined shares. We show that this game has a unique Nash equilibrium and discuss comparative statics. When the game is large, we show that players unanimously prefer the same value of the mixing parameter: the equilibrium elasticity of production. At this value, the equilibrium allocation is fully efficient. Our approach heavily exploits the fact that payoffs depend only on a player's input and the aggregate input.production externalities, non-cooperative games

Bilateral oligopoly and quantity competition

Bilateral oligopoly is a strategic market game with two commodities, allowing strategic behavior on both sides of the market. When the number of buyers is large, such a game approximates a game of quantity competition played by sellers. We present examples which show that this is not typically a Cournot game. Rather, we introduce an alternative game of quantity competition (the market share game) and, appealing to results in the literature on contests, show that this yields the same equilibria as the many-buyer limit of bilateral oligopoly, under standard assumptions on costs and preferences. We also show that the market share and Cournot games have the same equilibria if and only if the price elasticity of the latter is one. These results lead to necessary and su¢ cient conditions for the Cournot game to be a good approximation to bilateral oligopoly with many buyers and to an ordering of total output when they are not satisfied.Quantity competition, Cournot, strategic foundation, commitment

Mixed sharing rules

It is wellknown that a group of individuals contributing to a joint production process with diminishing returns will tend, in equilibrium, to put in too little effort if shares of the output are exogenous, and will put in too much effort if their shares are proportional to their inputs. We consider 'mixed' sharing rules, in which some proportion of the output will be shared exogenously, and the rest proportionally. We examine the efficiency properties of such rules, compare them with serial sharing rules, and suggest a sharing game whose noncooperative equilibrium is, in certain circumstances, Pareto efficientsurplus sharing, cost sharing, aggregative games

Who Really Wants to be a Millionaire : Estimates of Risk Aversion from Game Show Data

Risk aversion ; gameshow