Knowledge that Transforms

We introduce a distinction between a firm and its network of workers. In a competitive world, if networks are easily lured away, the workers must receive the entire value of their contribution to the firm. How then can service firms have equity value? A model is analysed in which workers are paid less as a group than their value, even in a competitive world. The workers are assumed to have a nonwage benefit for working at the current firm; this benefit is privately known. These privately known benefits make it impossible for the workers to agree on a division of their value should they leave the existing firm for a new enterprise. The result is that the workers may receive a total compensation that is less than their contribution to the firm.

Rigidities in real prices are not sufficient to create rigidities in nominal prices and real effects of nominal shocks. And, by themselves, small frictions in nominal adjustment, such as costs of changing prices, create only small non-neutralities. But this paper shows that substantial nominal rigidity can arise from a combination of real rigidities and small nominal frictions. The paper shows the connection between real and nominal rigidity given the presence of nominal frictions both in general and for two specific sources of real rigidity, one arising from goods market imperfections and the other from labour market imperfections.

A dynamic trading game is examined in which two uninformed buyers engage in Bertrand-like competition to attempt to purchase a single object of uncertain quality from an informed seller. It is shown that there exists a unique perfect sequential equilibrium. The game is compared to an analogous bargaining game in which a single uninformed buyer makes offers to a single seller. Despite the fact that in the equilibrium of the competitive game, buyers compete away their surplus, it is shown that sellers can often gain a higher ex ante surplus in the bargaining game.

In this paper two results are presented. Both refer to the impossibility theorem of Polemarchakis (1983). The Slutsky matrix of intratemporal and intertemporal substitution effects, associated with the individual short-run demand functions, is not arbitrary but symmetric if expectations are (strongly) Roy-consistent (and if the short-run marginal utility of income is continuously differentiable). The same matrix is symmetric and negative semi-definite under strong Royconsistency and a restriction on the expected second-order variation of future real income. These two results suppose a preliminary axiomatization of expectation functions. Weak and strong Roy-consistency are defined within this axiomatization.

Journal Article Household Equivalence Scales: Reply Get access Franklin M. Fisher Franklin M. Fisher Massachusetts Institute of Technology Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 57, Issue 2, April 1990, Pages 329–330, https://doi.org/10.2307/2297386 Published: 01 April 1990 Article history Received: 01 June 1989 Accepted: 01 June 1989 Published: 01 April 1990

This paper considers a matching model of which the search behaviour of Jovanovic (1979) and Albrecht and Jovanovic (1984) are special cases. The nature of the generality is that each unemployed worker has more information than firms about his average productivity. This results in wage offers falling over the length of an unemployment spell because a long spell is a signal of lower than average productivity. The results of the paper are similar to the scarring effect of Heckman and Borjas (1980) and Greenwald (1986) and the discouraged worker effect of Schweitzer and Smith (1974).

This paper is concerned with the problem of testing the hypothesis that the disturbances of a regression model are generated by a first-order autoregressive process against the alternative assumption that they follow a first-order moving average scheme. The test proposed has the advantages of requiring only ordinary least squares estimation and of being simple to implement. Some Monte Carlo results on the finite sample behaviour of the test are provided.

This article develops tests of covariance restrictions after estimating by three-stage least squares a dynamic random effects model from panel data. The asymptotic distribution of covariance matrix estimates under nonnormality is obtained. It is shown how minimum chi-square tests for interesting covariance restrictions can be calculated from a generalized linear regression involving the sample autocovariances and dummy variables. Asymptotic efficiency exploiting covariance restrictions can also be attained using a generalized least squares estimator.

The regret theory of choice under uncertainty is known to admit intransitivities in preference relations. In this paper, the stochastic dominance properties of the theory are examined. It is shown that the usual definition of first stochastic dominance is not satisfied by regret-theoretic preferences and that, in general, violations of first stochastic dominance are not merely permitted but required. An exact characterization of the stochastic dominance rule corresponding to regret-theoretic preferences is presented. This concept is weaker than the usual definition, but stronger than the notion of statewise dominance in which one prospect yields a preferred outcome with probability 1.

Consider the problem of Bayesian implementation, i.e., of constructing mechanisms with the property that all Bayesian equilibrium outcomes agree with a given choice rule. We show that a general procedure is to start with an incentive-compatible revelation mechanism, and then augment agents' message spaces in order to eliminate undesired equilibria. Specifically, we present an Augmented Revelation Principle, which states that if there exists any mechanism that implements a given choice rule, then an augmented revelation mechanism will also implement it. This principle enables us to obtain necessary conditions for implementation. For a large class of environments these conditions are also sufficient.