Suchergebnisse

Politicians who care about the spoils of office may underprovide a public good because its benefits cannot be targeted to voters as easily as pork-barrel spending. We compare a winner-take-all system—where all the spoils go to the winner—to a proportional system—where the spoils of office are split among candidates proportionally to their share of the vote. In a winner-take-all system the public good is provided less often than in a proportional system when the public good is particularly desirable. We then consider the electoral college system and show that it is particularly subject to this inefficiency. (JEL D82, L15)

We present a dynamic model of adverse selection to examine the interactions between new and used goods markets. We find that the used market never shuts down, the volume of trade can be large, and distortions are lower than previously thought. New cars prices can be higher under adverse selection than in its absence. An extension to several brands that differ in reliability leads to testable predictions of the effects of adverse selection. Unreliable brands have steeper price declines and lower volumes of trade. We contrast these predictions with those of a model where brands physically depreciate at different rates. (JEL D82, L15)

Front Cover -- Handbook of Industrial Organization, Volume 5 -- Copyright -- Contents -- Contributors -- Introduction to the series -- Preface -- 10 Market design -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Theoretical framework -- 2.1 Taxonomy of market design problems -- 2.1.1 Matching or allocation? -- 2.1.2 Transferable utility or non-transferable utility? -- 2.1.3 Single-unit vs. multi-unit demand? -- 2.1.4 Endowments? -- 2.1.5 Clarification: are schools in school-choice agents or objects? -- 2.2 Canonical market design problems -- 2.3 Canonical market-design mechanisms -- 2.3.1 Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance -- Key property: stability -- Key property: strategy-proof or approximately strategy-proof -- Key property: no justified envy -- Many-to-one variant -- Azevedo-Leshno price-theoretic interpretation of Gale-Shapley ("cutoff structure") -- Hatfield-Milgrom connection between Gale-Shapley and simultaneous ascending auctions -- 2.3.2 Immediate acceptance ("Boston mechanism") -- Key difference versus deferred acceptance -- The cutoff structure of immediate acceptance -- Discussion: strategic manipulability and efficiency -- 2.3.3 Random serial dictatorship -- Connection to deferred acceptance -- Key properties: strategy-proof and ex-post Pareto efficient -- 2.3.4 Top trading cycles -- Connection to competitive equilibrium -- Key properties: strategy-proof and ex-post Pareto efficient -- 2.3.5 Hylland and Zeckhauser pseudomarket -- The pseudomarket equilibrium -- Connection to the immediate acceptance algorithm -- Properties: ex-ante efficient, SP-L -- 2.3.6 Draft approaches to multi-unit assignment -- 2.3.7 Competitive equilibrium approaches to multi-unit assignment -- Approximate Competitive Equilibrium from Equal Incomes (A-CEEI) -- Multi-unit generalization of Hylland-Zeckhauser probability shares market -- Feeding America artificial-currency market.