Knowledge that Transforms

The paper employs a model of monopolistic competition and product differentiation with consumers who are not well informed about the specification of the offered brands. Welfare analysis of the degree of product differentiation in such a market concludes that the socially desirable product variety is limited due to consumers' imperfect information. Consequently, when the number of consumers is sufficiently large or economies to scale in production are sufficiently weak, the market would offer excessive variety.

This paper uses recursive competitive theory to develop a general equilibrium asset pricing model. In this framework all prices and rates of return are endogenously determined, thus enabling us to analyze the effects of changes in preferences, technological uncertainty, and expectations on the structure of security prices. In particular we focus on how the market risk premium varies with changes in the underlying economic environment, an issue which other asset pricing models have chosen not to address.

A first-bid auction to allocate the leadership role is used to choose a public decision and a balanced set of transfers. The mechanism is shown to implement an equal-sharing of the surplus above the "average" utility level. At the equilibrium an agent's message reveals the other agent's utility (when only two players are involved) and the exact value of the joint surplus. A variety of other contexts allow for the construction of similar auction-like mechanisms displaying the same mirror-image effect.

In this paper, we present the primal characterizations of the technologies that are consistent with capital aggregation. These characterizations are dual to the profit function restrictions obtained by Gorman and complete the closed-form production function restrictions obtained by Fisher. We use the result to solve a problem recently posed by Fisher. In addition, we pose and solve a natural extension of the usual capital aggregation problem.

In this paper, we extend to a general equilibrium context Bertrand's classic critique of Cournot. We present a game-theoretic model of a pure exchange, monetary economy, in which buyers as well as sellers announce both quantities and prices. When buyers act strategically, the "Edgeworth nonexistence problem" is circumvented: under weak conditions, a pure strategy Nash equilibrium exists for this game. We make precise the Bertrand idea that when agents in a finite economy are permitted to compete-by-price the resulting allocations will be competitive. Specifically, the Nash equilibria for our game yield allocations that are "competitive" allocations for the underlying exchange economy, provided that there are at least two buyers and two sellers actively trading in every market. Under this characterization of strategic behaviour, then, "two is enough for competition."

This paper presents an approach to inequality measurement based on an econometric model of aggregate consumer behaviour. The novel feature of this model is that systems of individual demand functions can be recovered uniquely from the system of aggregate demand functions. We present methods for evaluating social welfare based on an explicit social welfare function. This social welfare function incorporates measures of individual welfare based on indirect utility functions for all consumer units. We develop indexes of inequality based on actual and potential levels of social welfare.

A stochastic dynamic model of labour supply is specified and analysed empirically. The theoretical model provides a sound structural economic basis for a class of empirical models which have been shown useful. The implications of the estimated model are explored and diagnostic checks are suggested and implemented.

In this paper we prove some versions of the Arrow Impossibility Theorem, with the collective rationality condition weakened from transitivity to acyclicity, and the Pareto condition replaced by weaker conditions. Thus this result has weaker assumptions than versions of the Arrow Theorem which have previously appeared in the literature. Consequently it is one of the strongest impossibility theorems. Our result is an extension of a recent theorem of Blair and Pollak.

In the mid-1970s several authors studied models of markets with asymmetric information in which equilibria do not exist. Although those authors focused on models of insurance and education, it was recognized that similar nonexistence problems arise in a wide class of models with asymmetric information. Recently, Dasgupta and Maskin have demonstrated that for a game-theoretic version of at least one of those models, although no equilibria may exist in pure strategies, equilibria exist in mixed strategies. In the present paper we construct a mixed-strategy equilibrium for one member of the class—Spence's signalling model of education. Qualitative features of the equilibrium are explored.