A Theory of Debt Overhang and Buyback

sovereign debt, sovereign default, debt overhang, buyback

The Effect of Information on Gender Differences in Competitiveness: Experimental Evidence

An important line of recent literature has found gender differences in attitudes toward competition, with men being more likely to choose competitive incentive schemes, even when factors such as ability and risk aversion are controlled for. This paper examines the effect of information on the gender gap in tournament entry. We present experimental evidence that the competitiveness difference between men and women declines significantly when individuals are given performance feedback before making their incentive scheme choice. The result suggests that policies that reduce uncertainty can reduce the gender gap in tournament entry.Experiments, gender, competition, information, incentive schemes.

Definable and Contractible Contracts

This paper analyzes Bayesian normal form games in which players write contracts that condition their actions on the contracts of the other players. These contracts are required to be representable in a formal language. This is accomplished by constructing contracts which are definable functions of the Godel code of every other player's contract. We provide a complete characterization of the set of allocations supportable as pure strategy Bayesian equilibrium of this contracting game. When information is complete, this characterization provides a folk theorem. In general, the set of supportable allocations is smaller than the set supportable by a centralized mechanism designer.

A resurrection of the Condorcet Jury Theorem

This paper analyzes the optimal size of a deliberating committee where (i) there is no conflict of interest among individuals and (ii) information acquisition is costly. The committee members simultaneously decide whether to acquire information, and then make the ex-post efficient decision. The optimal committee size, k*, is shown to be bounded. The main result of this paper is that any arbitrarily large committee aggregates the decentralized information more efficiently than the committee of size k*-2. This result implies that oversized committees generate only small inefficiencies.Voting, information aggregation, costly information

Information Design in the Hold-up Problem

We analyze a bilateral trade model where the buyer can choose the probability distribution of her valuation for the good. The seller, after observing the buyer’s choice of the distribution but not the realized valuation, makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer. If the buyer’s choice of the distribution is costless, the price and the payoffs of both the buyer and the seller are shown to be 1/e in the unique equilibrium outcome. The equilibrium distribution of the buyer’s valuation generates a unit-elastic demand and trade is ex-post efficient. These two properties are shown to be preserved even when different distributions are differentially costly as long as the cost is monotone in the dispersion of the distribution

Gyeptelepítés elmélete és gyakorlata az ökológiai szemléletű gazdálkodásban

Az utóbbi években egyre nagyobb az igény mind hazánkban, mind Európában a szántóföldi művelés alól kivett területek alternatív, fenntartható hasznosítására, melyre jó lehetőséget biztosít az ökológiai szemléletű gyepgazdálkodás. A gyepesítéssel szemben támasztott legfontosabb elvárás egy főképp füvek dominálta évelő gyep létrejötte, amely visszaszorítja a nemkívánatos gyomfajokat. Ökológiai célú gyeptelepítés esetén rendkívül fontos a megfelelő szaporítóanyagok, a megfelelő fűfajok kiválasztása és a természetkímélő technológia alkalmazása. A telepítendő fajokat a terület ökológiai jellemzőinek (talajtípus, vízgazdálkodás, hőmérséklet és csapadék viszonyok) figyelembe vételével és a későbbi hasznosítás (legeltetés, kaszálás) szempontjait szem előtt tartva kell kiválasztani. A telepítés időpontját és technológiáját szintén össze kell hangolni a termőhelyi adottságokkal és a későbbi hasznosítással. Legújabb kiadványunk olyan tudományos igényességgel kidolgozott, de a mindennapi gazdálkodásban alkalmazható szakanyag, amely felhívja a figyelmet az ökológiai szempontú gyeptelepítés legfontosabb szempontjaira, a gyeptelepítéshez használt magkeverékkel szemben támasztott kívánalmakra, a telepítés gyakorlati kivitelezésére, valamint várható gép- és költségigényére. A kiadvány a Debreceni Egyetem Ökológiai Tanszéke közreműködésével, Dr. Török Péter szerkesztésében valósult meg. A projekt a Magyar Nemzeti Vidéki Hálózat Elnökségének értékelése és javaslata alapján, az Európai Mezőgazdasági és Vidékfejlesztési Alap társfinanszírozásában, a Nemzeti Vidékfejlesztési Program Irányító Hatóságának jóváhagyásával válhatott valóra

A network approach to public goods

Abstract We study settings where each agent can exert costly effort that creates nonrival, heterogeneous benefits for some of the others. For example, municipalities can forgo consumption to reduce pollution. How do the prospects for efficient cooperation depend on asymmetries in the effects of players' actions? We approach this question by analyzing a network that describes the marginal benefits agents can confer on one another. The first set of results explains how the largest eigenvalue of this network measures the marginal gains available from cooperating; as an application, we describe the players whose participation is essential to achieving any Pareto improvement on an inefficient status quo. Next, we examine mechanisms all of whose equilibria are Pareto efficient and individually rational; an outcome is called robust if it is an equilibrium outcome in every such mechanism. Robust outcomes exist and correspond to the Lindahl public goods solutions. The main result is a characterization of effort levels at these outcomes in terms of players' centralities in the benefits network. It entails that an outcome is robust if and only if agents contribute in proportion to how much they value the efforts of those who help them

Optimal Information Disclosure in Auctions and the Handicap Auction

We analyse a situation where a monopolist is selling an indivisible good to risk-neutral buyers who only have an estimate of their private valuations. The seller can release, without observing, certain additional signals that affect the buyers' valuations. Our main result is that in the expected revenue-maximizing mechanism, the seller makes available all the information that she can, and her expected revenue is the same as it would be if she could observe the part of the information that is "new" to the buyers. We also show that this mechanism can be implemented by what we call a "handicap auction "in interesting applications. In the first round of this auction, each buyer picks a price premium from a menu offered by the seller (a smaller premium costs more). Then the seller releases the additional signals. In the second round, the buyers bid in a second-price auction where the winner pays the sum of his premium and the second highest non-negative bid. In the case of a single buyer, this mechanism simplifies to a menu of European call options. Copyright 2007 The Review of Economic Studies Limited.