Sovereign-debt Renegotiations: A Strategic Analysis

The process of debt-rescheduling between a creditor and a sovereign (LDC) debtor is modeled as a noncooperative game built on a one-sector growth model. The creditor's threat to impose default penalties is ignored here as inherently incredible; instead, the debtor's motivation for repayment is to reap benefits from attaining an improved credit standing in international capital markets. The creditor can forgive portions of the outstanding debt so that a real-time bargaining process results with concessions being in the form of debt-service payments by the debtor and debt forgiveness by the creditor. Subgame-perfect equilibria of the game are characterized the main finding is that these all result in Pareto optima in which the creditor extracts all the surplus.

Some Inefficiency Implication of Generational Politics and Exchange

Generational selfishness is a central assumption in the vast literature on the life cycle model. Much of this literature deals with the impact of alternative government policies in light of self-interested generational behavior. Surprisingly, the choices of governments in virtually all of these analyses are assumed to be independent of the preferences of the selfish generations these governments presumably represent. We address this anomaly by modeling each generation as having a government that strictly represents the economy along a number of dimensions. We consider two types of inefficiencies that have received little or no attention in the literature. The first is the monopolization of factor supplies, and the second is the under- or overprovision of durable public goods. We demonstrate that selfish generations may place sizable marginal taxes on their factor supplies in order to monopolize their factor markets. We also show that selfish generations will provide inefficient levels of durable public goods both at the local and national levels. Finally, we demonstrate that generational inefficiencies can arise even in models of cooperative bargaining because of the first-mover advantage of earlier generations.

Hide and Seek in Arizona

Laboratory subjects repeatedly played one of two variations of a simple two-person zero-sum game of ``hide and seek.'' Three puzzling departures from the prescriptions of equilibrium theory are found in the data: an asymmetry related to the player's role in the game; an asymmetry across the game variations; and positive serial correlation in subjects' play. Possible explanations for these departures are considered.Minimax, mixed strategy, experiment

A Strategic Altruism Model In Which Ricardian Equivalence Does Not Hold

This article demonstrates that Ricardian Equivalence does not necessarily hold in models with altruistic transfers once one takes into account the strategic behavior of recipients as well as donors. To influence the final allocation of consumption in altruistic settings, potential recipients can threaten to refuse as well as accept transfers. We apply the Extended Nash Bargaining Solution to the problem of an altruistic parent and a possibly altruistic child. The parent and child first choose a threat point noncooperatively; this threat point then influences the final allocation of consumption through the standard Nash Bargaining Solution, While the potential recipient can refuse transfers from the potential donor, he cannot refuse transfers from the government. When the government redistributes between the parent and child, it changes their endowments and the equilibrium threats, and thus the final allocation of consumption. The feature of the cooperative model presented here that leads to the failure of Ricardian Equivalence may be characteristic of a wider class of cooperative and noncooperative altruism models. This feature is that noninterior strategic postures underlie interior transfer behavior and that these non- interior strategic postures are altered by government redistribution.

Fever in Neoplastic Disease

A comparison is made between incidence of fever in 132 patients with various types of disseminated cancer and 57 patients with diseases other than cancer during a 2- month observation period. Fifty-three febrile episodes were observed in cancer patients. Of these, 15 were of undetermined origin and 6 were noninfectious; none of the episodes occurred immediately following surgery. In the control group of 57 patients, there were 12 febrile episodes; of these, 7 were due to proven bacterial infection, 2 were due lo possible bacterial infection, and 3 were of undetermined etiology. All three febrile episodes in this latter group occurred postoperatively. The pathogenesis of fever is discussed, especially unexplained fever, in the absence of infection. Tissue necrosis, with the release of endogenous pyrogen, is suggested as a pathogenic mechanism in neoplastic fevers. It is of interest that unexplained fever was more prevalent in patients with demonstrable liver metastases. The metabolism of naturally occurring steroid hormones may be impaired by hepatic dysfunction. The role of steroid pyrogens remains undefined. Hepatic dysfunction may be a contributory factor

On some myths about sequenced common-value auctions

Equilibria are constructed for classes of game models of sequenced second-price auctions having identical common-valued objects In some of these the equilibrium price falls on average, and in others the seller loses on average by committing to announce publicly something that he knows. Both of these possibilities are surprises