Partha Dasgupta, Eric Maskin; The Existence of Equilibrium in Discontinuous Economic Games, II: Applications, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 53, Is

Partha Dasgupta, Eric Maskin; The Existence of Equilibrium in Discontinuous Economic Games, I: Theory, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 53, Issue 1, 1 Jan

We propose an evolutionary explanation for the pattern of intertemporal preference reversals often ascribed to hyperbolic discounting. We take the view that preferences—manifested, for example, in urges, cravings, and inclinations— are the outcome of evolutionary forces, and so will induce animals or humans to make survival-maximizing choices in decision problems. We show that if the typical problem involves payoffs whose realization times are uncertain, then optimal preferences give rise to relatively patient behavior when the time horizon is long but induce a switch to impatience when the horizon grows short. Such reversals do not entail dynamic inconsistency in typical decision problems; behavior there is optimal. However, if a decision-maker is confronted with a choice for which the realization-time uncertainty falls outside the evolutionary norm, her preferences may well prompt her to behave inconsistently. We argue that, if such a choice problem recurs, her evolutionarily endowed aability to learn will lead her to make self-commitments against these urges.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Partha Dasgupta, Geoffrey Heal; The Optimal Depletion of Exhaustible Resources12, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 41, Issue 5, 1 December 1974, Page

Partha Dasgupta, Joseph Stiglitz; On Optimal Taxation and Public Production12, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 39, Issue 1, 1 January 1972, Pages 87

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Partha Dasgupta, Peter Hammond, Eric Maskin; The Implementation of Social Choice Rules: Some General Results on Incentive Compatibility, The Review of Econ

This article examines the relative merits of tariffs and quotas as revenue raising devices in the presence of economic uncertainty. It has long been recognized that, provided the government auctions off the quota, the optimum pure tariff and the optimum pure quota are equivalent in a competitive world with no uncertainty. However, in such a world the equivalence is between a pure tariff and a pure quota that are both functions of the state of nature. The border policies that are most commonly resorted to by governments are fixed tariff rates and fixed quantity restrictions. They are often regarded as polar forms of trade restrictions. They have different very different effects: a fixed tariff on a commodity stabilizes its domestic price in the face of random domestic demand and supply but a fixed international price; while a quota stabilizes its domestic price if its international price is random but its domestic demand and supply functions are fixed. Results of the study reveal that under the conventional criterion of maximizing the expected value of net consumer's surplus, the optimum fixed tariff is superior to the optimum fixed quota. The result continues to hold if instead the maxi-min criterion is followed.