This paper considers why organizations use promotions, rather than just monetary bonuses, to motivate employees even though this may conflict with efficient assignment of employees to jobs. When performance is unverifiable, use of promotion reduces the incentive for managers to be affected by influence activities that would blunt the effectiveness of monetary bonuses. When employees are risk neutral, use of promotion for incentives need not distort assignments. When they are risk averse, it may—sufficient conditions for this are given. The distortion may be either to promote more employees than is efficient (the Peter Principle effect) or fewer. “Promotions serve two roles in an organization. First, they help assign people to the roles where they can best contribute to the organization's performance. Second, promotions serve as incentives and rewards.” (Milgrom and Roberts (1992, p. 364)) “Promotions are used as the primary incentive device in most organizations, including corporations, partnerships, and universities … This … is puzzling to us because promotion-based incentive schemes have many disadvantages and few advantages relative to bonus-based incentive schemes.” (Baker, Jensen and Murphy (1988, p. 600

The rules under which jurisdictions (nations, provinces) can deny immigration or expel residents are generally governed by a constitution, but there do not exist either positive or normative analyses to suggest what types of exclusion rules are best. We stylize this problem by suggesting four constitutional rules of admission: free mobility, admission by majority vote, admission by unanimous consent, admission by a demand threshold for public goods. In a simple model we characterize the equilibria that result from these rules, and provide a positive theory for which constitutional rules will be chosen.

This paper considers discounted repeated games with boundedly rational players. In each period, player i chooses his current action on the basis of his forecast about the forthcoming n(i) action profiles; his assessment of the payoffs he will obtain next depends on his state of mind, which is non-deterministic. A limited forecast equilibrium is such that after every history the limited horizon forecasts formed by the players are correct. The set of all limited forecast equilibria is characterized and constructed. Application to the repeated prisoner's dilemma shows that limited foresight may sometimes induce purely cooperative paths while purely non-cooperative paths cannot arise

I develop a dynamic political economy theory of optimal taxation and budget distortions in a model with partisan politics. Under asymmetric information, politics affects the distribution of utilities in the economy. Political regime switching introduces fluctuations of this distribution. These fluctuations justify strategic budget distortions by governments currently holding office and willing to favour their redistributive concerns against future majority. Under quite general assumptions on preferences, these distortions take the form of budget deficits (resp. surpluses) with leftist (rightist) governments. Endogenizing the probabilities of getting elected may reverse this result.

A competitive economy is studied in which sellers offer alternative direct mechanisms to buyers who have correlated private information about their valuations. In contrast to the monopoly case where sellers charge entry fees and extract all buyers' surplus, it is shown that in the unique symmetric equilibrium with competition, sellers hold second price auctions with reserve prices set equal to their cost. Most important, it is a best reply for sellers not to charge entry fees of the kind normally used to extract surplus, even though it is feasible for them to do so.

We investigate the effects of contract renegotiation in multi-agent situations where risk averse agents negotiate a contract offer to the principal after the agents observe a common, unverifiable perfect signal about their actions. We show that renegotiation with multiple agents reduces the cost of implementing any implementable action profile down to the first-best level, even though the principal cannot observe the agents’ actions. Moreover, it is sufficient for the principal to use a “simple” initial contract, in the sense that it consists of no more than a single sharing scheme for each agent and the total payments to the agents are the same regardless of the realised state. An important implication is that decentralization, in the sense of delegated negotiation and proposals from the agents, can be as effective as centralized schemes that utilize revelation mechanisms in unrestricted ways.

This paper studies the impact of lobbying on political competition and policy outcomes in a framework which integrates the citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with the menu-auction model of lobbying. Positive and normative issues are analysed. On the positive side, lobbying need have little or no effect on policy outcomes because voters can restrict the influence of lobbyists by supporting candidates with offsetting policy preferences. On the normative side, coordination failure among lobbyists can result in Pareto inefficient policy choices. In addition, by creating rents to holding office, lobbying can lead to “excessive” entry into electoral competition

Car prices in Europe are characterized by large and persistent differences across countries. The purpose of this paper is to document and explain this price dispersion. Using a panel data set extending from 1980 to 1993, we first demonstrate two main facts concerning car prices in Europe: (1) The existence of significant differences in quality adjusted prices across countries, with Italy and the U.K. systematically representing the most expensive markets. (2) Substantial year-to-year volatility that is to a large extent accounted for by exchange rate fluctuations and the incomplete response of local currency prices to these fluctuations. These facts are analysed within the framework of a multiproduct oligopoly model with product differentiation. The model identifies three potential sources for the international price differences: price elasticities generating differences in markups, costs, and import quota constraints. Local currency price stability can be attributed either to the presence of a local component in marginal costs, or to markup adjustment that is correlated with exchange rate volatility; the latter requires that the perceived elasticity of demand is increasing in price. We find that the primary reason for the higher prices in Italy is the existence of a strong bias for domestic brancs that generates high markups for the domestic firm (Fiat). In the U.K. higher prices are mainly attributed to better equipped cars and/or differences in the dealer discount practices. The import quota constraints are found to have a significant impact on Japanese car prices in Italy, France and the U.K. With respect to local currency price stability, a large percentage of the documented price inertia can be attributed to local costs, and a smaller fraction to markup adjustment that is indicative of price discrimination. Based on these results we conjecture that the EMU will substantially reduce the year-to-year volatility observed in the car price data, but without further measures to increase European integration, it will not completely eliminate existing cross-country price differences

Is more intense product market competition and imitation good or bad for growth? This question is addressed in the context of an endogenous growth model with “step-by-step” innovations, in which technological laggards must first catch up with the leading-edge technology before battling for technological leadership in the future. In contrast to earlier Schumpeterian models in which innovations are always made by outsider firms who earn no rents if they fail to innovate and become monopolies if they do innovate, here we find: first, that the usual Schumpeterian effect of more intense product market competition (PMC) is almost always outweighed by the increased incentive for firms to innovate in order to escape competition, so that PMC has a positive effect on growth; second, that a little imitation is almost always growth-enhancing, as it promotes more frequent neck-and-neck competition, but too much imitation is unambiguously growth-reducing. The model thus points to complementary roles for competition (anti-trust) policy and patent policy.

This paper provides an analysis of aggregate behavioural outcomes when individual utility exhibits social interaction effects. We study generalized logistic models of individual choice which incorporate terms reflecting the desire of individuals to conform to the behaviour of others in an environment of noncooperative decisionmaking. Laws of large numbers are generated in such environments. Multiplicity of equilibria in these models, which are equivalent to the existence of multiple self-consistent means for average choice behaviour, will exist when the social interactions exceed a particular threshold. Local stability of these multiple equilibria is also studied. The properties of the noncooperative economy are contrasted with the properties of an economy in which a social planner determines the set of individual choices. Finally, a likelihood function based on the theoretical model is given and conditions for the econometric identifiability of the model are established