Knowledge that Transforms

Continuing rapid growth in U.S. gasoline consumption threatens to exacerbate environmental and congestion problems. We use flexible semiparametric and nonparametric methods to guide analysis of household gasoline consumption, and including this variable cuts the estimated income elasticity in half. Slower projected future growth in licensed drivers points to slower growth in gasoline consumption. A parsimonious representation of age, income, lifecycle and location effects is developed and tested. We show how flexible methods also helped reveal fundamental problems with the available price data.

In this paper we derive a model of aggregate investment that builds from the lumpy microeconomic behavior of firms facing stochastic fixed adjustment costs. Instead of the standard sharp (S,s) bands, firms' adjustment policies take the form of a probability of adjustment (adjustment hazard) that responds smoothly to changes in firms' capacity gap. The model has appealing aggregation properties, and yields nonlinear aggregate time series processes. The passivity of normal times is, occasionally, more than offset by the brisk response to large accumulated shocks. Using within and out-of-sample criteria, we find that the model performs substantially better than the standard linear models of investment for postwar sectoral U.S. manufacturing equipment and structures investment data.

We consider strategyproof social choice functions defined over product domains. If preferences are strict orderings and separable, then strategyproof social choice functions must be decomposable provided that the domain of preferences is rich. We provide several characterization results in the case where preferences are separable only with respect to the elements of some partition of the set of components and these partitions vary across individuals. We characterize the libertarian social choice function and show that no superset of the tops separable domain admits strategyproof nondictatorial social choice functions.

We consider the problem of the design and sale of a security backed by specified assets. Given access to higher-return investments, the issuer has an incentive to raise capital by securitizing part of these assets. At the time the security is issued, the issuer's or underwriter's private information regarding the payoff of the security may cause illiquidity, in the form of a downward-sloping demand curve for the security. The severity of this illiquidity depends upon the sensitivity of the value of the issued security to the issuer's private information. Thus, the security-design problem involves a tradeoff between the retention cost of holding cash flows not included in the security design, and the liquidity cost of including the cash flows and making the security design more sensitive to the issuer's private information. We characterize the optimal security design in several cases. We also demonstrate circumstances under which standard debt is optimal and show that the riskiness of the debt is increasing in the issuer's retention costs for assets.

We study economies with one private good and one pure public good, and consider the following axioms of social choice functions. Strategy-proofness says that no agent can benefit by misrepresenting his preferences, regardless of whether the other agents misrepresent or not, and whatever his preferences are. Symmetry says that if two agents have the same preference, they must be treated equally. Anonymity says that when the preferences of two agents are switched, their consumption bundles are also switched. Individual rationality says that a social choice function never assigns an allocation which makes some agent worse off than he would be by consuming no public good and paying nothing. In Theorem 1, we characterize the class of strategy-proof, budget-balancing, and symmetric social choice functions, assuming convexity of the cost function of the public good. In Theorem 2, we characterize the class of strategy-proof, budget-balancing, and anonymous social choice functions. In Theorem 3, we characterize the class of strategy-proof, budget-balancing, symmetric, and individually rational social choice functions.

It is shown that the linkage principle (Milgrom and Weber (1982)) does not extend to the multi-unit auction setting. An analysis of the equilibium bidding strategies is carried out for the general two-agent/two-unit Vickrey auction in order to provide economic insight into the nature of the failure.

Bidding is studied in first-price common value auctions where an insider is better informed than other bidders (outsiders) about the value of the item. With inexperienced bidders, having an insider does not materially reduce the severity of the winner's curse compared to auctions with a symmetric information structure (SIS). In contrast, super-experienced bidders, who have largely overcome the winner's curse, satisfy the comparative static predictions of equilibrium bidding theory: (i) average seller's revenue is larger with an insider than in SIS auctions, (ii) insiders make substantially greater profits, conditional on winning, than outsiders, and (iii) insiders increase their bids in response to more rivals. Further, changes in insiders' bids are consistent with directional learning theory (Selten and Buchta (1994)).