Suchergebnisse

This paper models "no war, no peace" situations in a game theoretical framework where two countries are engaged in a standoff over a military sector. The first main objective is to identify rational grounds for such situations and, more precisely, explicit equilibria that leads to such situations. It is demonstrated that both countries get the same payoff from being in this continuous state of perpetual hostility and, moreover, that "no war, no peace" situations can be explained only if the countries perceive an equal measure of military advantage by controlling the area. Given this insight, the second objective of the paper is to provide insights about how "no war, no peace" situations can be resolved. Two different pathways are suggested. The first is idealistic and based on mutual trust whereas the second is based on deterrence meaning that both countries impose a threat of using armed force against the other country in their respective military doctrines.

The member states of the European Union received 1.2 million first time asylum applications in 2015 (a doubling compared to 2014). Even if asylum will be granted for many of the refugees that made the journey to Europe, several obstacles for successful integration remain. This paper focuses on one of these obstacles, namely the problem of finding housing for refugees once they have been granted asylum. In particular, the focus is restricted to the situation in Sweden during 2015–2016 and it is demonstrated that market design can play an important role in a partial solution to the problem. More specifically, because almost all accommodation options are exhausted in Sweden, the paper investigates a matching system, closely related to the system adopted by the European NGO "Refugees Welcome", and proposes an easy-to-implement mechanism that finds an efficient stable maximum matching. Such matching guarantees that housing is efficiently provided to a maximum number of refugees and that no refugee prefers some landlord to their current match when, at the same time, that specific landlord prefers that refugee to his current match.

In many real-life house allocation problems, rents are bounded from above by price ceilings imposed by a government or a local administration. This is known as rent control. Because some price equilibria may be disqualified given such restrictions, this paper proposes an alternative equilibrium concept, called rationing price equilibrium, tailored to capture the specific features of housing markets with rent control. An allocation rule that always selects a rationing price equilibrium is defined, and it is demonstrated to be ``efficient" and (group) non-manipulable for ``almost all" preference profiles. In its bounding cases, the rule reduces to a number of well-known mechanisms from the matching literature. In this sense, the housing market with rent control investigated in this paper integrates several of the predominant matching models into a more general framework.