Optimal Litigation Strategies with Signaling and Screening

This paper examines the strategic effects of case preparation in litigation. Specifically, it shows how the pretrial efforts incurred by one party may alter its adversary’s incentives to settle. We build a sequential game with one-sided asymmetric information where the informed party first decides to invest, or not, in case preparation, and the uninformed party then makes a settlement offer. Overinvestment, or bluff, always prevails in equilibrium: with positive probability, plaintiffs with weak cases take a chance on investing, and regret it in case of trial. Furthermore, due to the endogenous investment decision, the probability of trial may (locally) decrease with case strength. Overinvestment generates inefficient preparation costs, but may trigger more settlements, thereby reducing trial costs.case preparation, settlement, trial, signaling

A Treatment Effect Method for Merger Analysis with an Application to Parking Prices in Paris

Most retrospective merger studies resort to the treatment effect approach, comparing the price dynamics in a treatment group and in a control group. We propose a systematic method to construct the groups, which applies to any industry with spatial competition. The method is consistent with the fact that mergers alter oligopolistic equilibria in complex ways, and thus that seemingly distant entities may be affected through indirect channels. An illustration based on a merger in the Parisian parking market is provided.merger retrospective analysis, treatment effect models

Assessing Horizontal Mergers under Uncertain Efficiency Gains

The analysis of horizontal mergers hinges on a tradeoff between unilateral effects and efficiency gains. The article examines the role of uncertainty (on the efficiency gains) in this tradeoff. Common wisdom is that the antitrust authorities should be very cautious about random gains. Our results show that dismissing efficiency gains on the sole ground that they are uncertain would not be theoretically founded. Indeed, the attitude towards uncertainty depends on the curvature of the social objective function. We exhibit a number of situations where the objective is convex in the efficiency gains, implying that competition authorities should welcome the risk for a given expectation of efficiency gains. Implications for empirical merger analysis are exposed.merger analysis, antitrust, efficiency gains, uncertainty

Negative marginal tax rates and heterogeneity

Heterogeneity is likely to be an important determinant of the shape of optimal tax schemes. This article addresses the issue in a model � la Mirrlees with a continuum of agents. The agents differ in their productivities and opportunity costs of work, but their labor supplies depend only on a unidimensional combination of their two characteristics. Conditions are given under which the standard result that marginal tax rates are everywhere non-negative holds. This is in particular the case when work opportunity costs are distributed independently of productivities. But one can also get negative marginal tax rates: economies where negative tax rates are optimal at the bottom of the income distribution are studied, and a numerical illustration is given, based on UK data.Optimal taxation, heterogeneity, welfare.

Optimal Rationing within a Heterogeneous Population

URL des Documents de travail : http://ces.univ-paris1.fr/cesdp/cesdp2014.htmlDocuments de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 2014.32 - ISSN : 1955-611XA government agency delegates to a provider (hospital, medical gatekeeper, school, social worker) the decision to supply a service or treatment to individual recipients. The agency does not perfectly know the distribution of individual treatment costs in the population. The single-crossing property is not satisfied when the uncertainty pertains to the dispersion of the distribution. We find that the provision of service should then be distorted upwards relative to efficiency when the (first-best) efficient number of recipients is sufficiently high.Une autorité centrale délègue à un agent (un hôpital, un médecin référent, une école ou des travailleurs sociaux) la décision de délivrer ou non un service ou un traitement à des individus. L'autorité ne connaît pas exactement la distribution des coûts que l'agent doit supporter pour traiter les individus dans la population. La propriété de Spence-Mirrlees n'est pas satisfaisante lorsque l'incertitude porte sur la dispersion de cette distribution. Nous montrons que la quantité optimale de traitements à réaliser devrait être accrue par rapport à la décision optimale en premier rang lorsque le nombre d'individus qu'il faudrait traiter en premier rang est suffisamment élevé

Female Labor Supply and Child Care in France

We use French household data to estimate a structural model of female labor supply and use of paid child care outside the home. Child care costs are found to have little impact on the labor market participation decision of mothers. The model is used to study various policy issues. The influence of the current tax credit on child care expenditures on the mothers’ labor supply is weak. Suppressing the APE (Parental Allowance for the Education) would cause the female participation rate in our sample to rise by 4 points and the proportion of mothers using paid care to rise by 2 points. The responses of women to policy changes are very heterogenous. Macroeconomic changes in female labor supply are equally due to switches between non-participation and participation and switches between working hours by working women.female labor supply, child care, welfare participation, fiscal policy

Analyse stratégique des garanties de prix bas : une brève revue de la littérature

I. — Introduction Les distributeurs utilisent divers instruments pour s’engager vis-à-vis des consommateurs à pratiquer des prix bas. Ils peuvent offrir d’aligner leurs prix sur ceux de leurs concurrents ou de rembourser la différence si un client a acheté le produit alors qu’il aurait pu le trouver moins cher ailleurs (price matching). Parfois, les distributeurs proposent un remboursement supérieur à la différence de prix constatée par le client (price beating). Ainsi, en 2007, l’enseigne Ca..

Graphon Estimation in bipartite graphs with observable edge labels and unobservable node labels

Many real-world data sets can be presented in the form of a matrix whose entries correspond to the interaction between two entities of different natures (number of times a web user visits a web page, a student's grade in a subject, a patient's rating of a doctor, etc.). We assume in this paper that the mentioned interaction is determined by unobservable latent variables describing each entity. Our objective is to estimate the conditional expectation of the data matrix given the unobservable variables. This is presented as a problem of estimation of a bivariate function referred to as graphon. We study the cases of piecewise constant and H\"older-continuous graphons. We establish finite sample risk bounds for the least squares estimator and the exponentially weighted aggregate. These bounds highlight the dependence of the estimation error on the size of the data set, the maximum intensity of the interactions, and the level of noise. As the analyzed least-squares estimator is intractable, we propose an adaptation of Lloyd's alternating minimization algorithm to compute an approximation of the least-squares estimator. Finally, we present numerical experiments in order to illustrate the empirical performance of the graphon estimator on synthetic data sets

Environmental Humanities: Wissenstransfer und Wissenserneuerung in Frankreich und Deutschland – Einleitung

Seit wenigen Jahren ist im internationalen Rahmen von den Environmental Humanities die Rede, wenn es darum geht, die gemeinsamen Forschungsinteressen von Kultur- und Literaturökologie, Umweltsoziologie, -anthropologie und Humangeographie, Umweltgeschichte und Umweltethik u.a. zu unterstreichen. Für deren gemeinsames, und doch fachspezifisch unterschiedlich gelagertes Interesse an Mensch-Umwelt-Beziehungen unter den Vorzeichen der ökologischen Krise und für deren interdisziplinäre Zusammenarbe..