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It is widely accepted among axiomatic bargaining theorists that if one bargainer is more risk averse than a second, the second will be a tougher bargaining opponent than the first against all opponents. We argue that this relationship between risk aversion and bargaining toughness is both highly fragile, and more nuanced than previously articulated. In the Nash and Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining frameworks, we establish that when a bargainer is compared with a second who is "almost globally" more risk averse than the first, the supposedly immutable relationship between bargaining effectiveness and risk aversion evaporates. Specifically, we identify an upper-hemicontinuity failure of a correspondence which maps the power set of all lotteries to those utility pairs that satisfy our "almost global" comparative risk aversion relation on these subsets. We trace the consensus view that tougher bargainers are less risk-averse to an exclusive focus on precisely the point at which this correspondence implodes.

We study an information aggregation game in which each of a finite collection of “senders” receives a private signal and submits a report to the center, who then makes a decision based on the average of these reports. The integration of three features distinguishes our framework from the related literature: players’ reports are aggregated by a mechanistic averaging rule, their strategy sets are intervals rather than binary choices, and they are ex ante heterogeneous. In this setting, players engage in a “tug-of-war,” as they exaggerate and counter-exaggerate in order to manipulate the center’s decision. While incentives to exaggerate have been studied extensively, the phenomenon of counter-exaggeration is less well understood. Our main results are as follows. First, the cycle of counter-exaggeration can be broken only by the imposition of exogenous bounds on the space of admissible sender reports. Second, in the unique pure-strategy equilibrium, all but at most one player is constrained with positive probability by one of the report bounds. Our third and fourth results hold for a class of “anchored” games. We show that if the report space is strictly contained in the signal space, then welfare is increasing in the size of the report space, but if the containment relation is reversed, welfare is independent of the size of the space. Finally, the equilibrium performance of our heterogeneous players can be unambiguously ranked: a player’s equilibrium payoff is inversely related to the probability that her exaggeration will be thwarted by the report bounds.

We show that, when there is joint production of an agricultural good and rural amenities, the first-best allocation of resources can be implemented with a tax on the agricultural good and some subsidies on the production factors (land and labor). The use of a subsidy on the agricultural good can only be explained by the desire of the policymaker to redistribute income from the consumers to the farmers.

This paper studies a class of information aggregation models which we call “aggregation games.” It departs from the related literature in two main respects: information is aggregated by averaging rather than majority rule, and each player selects from a continuum of reports rather than making a binary choice. Each member of a group receives a private signal, then submits a report to the center, who makes a decision based on the average of these reports. The essence of an aggregation game is that heterogeneous players engage in a “tug-of-war,” as they attempt to manipulate the center’s decision process by mis-reporting their private information. When players have distinct biases, almost of them rationally exaggerate the extent of these biases. The degree of exaggeration increases with the number of players: if the game is sufficiently large, then almost all players exaggerate to the maximum admissible extent, regardless of their individual signals. In the limit, the connection between players’ private information and the outcome of the game is obliterated.

The basic concern of this paper is the effect of private sponsorship of university research on the allocation of expenditures between public good research and commercial applications. Throughout the land-grant university system, there is much concern that as a result of reduced government funding, fundamental research will be neglected at the expense of research that is geared toward commercial applications. This paper attempts to shed some light on the relationship between research priorities and the availability of public funding for university research. In particular, we use both a static and a dynamic model to investigate the conditions under which university/private research partnerships can "crowd-in" or "crowd-out" basic science research as public funding becomes scarcer.

What is the Price of Oil?Farmland Conversion in California: Evidence from the Williamson Act ProgramCalifornia’s Water Problems: Why a Comprehensive Solution Makes Sense

We consider the impact of taxes on the quantity and quality produced of goods whose market values accrue with age. The analysis is motivated by the high and increasing taxation rates in the wine industry across the globe. If society values both quality and quantity as goods, an optimal tax system would never reduce the quality marketed, though it necessarily reduces quantity. Any two-tax system that includes a volumetric sales tax and any one of three other types of tax - an ad valorem sales tax, an ad valorem storage tax, or a volumetric storage tax - spans the quality/revenue space and can support an optimal tax system. Any tax system that reduces quality relative to the market equilibrium with no taxes could increase tax revenues and reduce the quality distortion without increasing the quantity distortion. Given this, the only explanation for taxation schemes that reduce both the quantity and quality of goods like wine must be a Calvinistic social welfare function.

The model presented in this paper juxtaposes two theories for why a firm might offer creditors a security interest to back up a loan. One theory holds that issuing secured debt allows the firm's owners to reduce expected payments in the event of bankruptcy to so-called "non-adjusting" creditors, who cannot or do not adjust the size of their claims in response. An important class of such non-adjusting claims are liability claims on the firm. The other theory holds that issuing secured debt solves an underinvestment problem: the firm may only be able to finance a growth opportunity if it offers new investors a security interest.Recognizing that most real-world firms face both non-adjusting claims and growth opportunities, we combine the two theories in a single model. We find that firms generally choose an interior secured-debt ratio, and all firms smaller than a critical size choose a strictly higher secured-debt ratio than firms larger than the critical size. Moreover, the relationship between the optimal secured-debt ratio and firm size is highly nonlinear in ways consistent with the empirical evidence: the optimal ratio mayor may not initially increase in firm size, then tends to decrease, and then becomes constant.

The burden of resolving an environmental problem is typically shared among several responsible parties. To clarify the nature and extent of the problem, these parties must provide information to the regulator. Based on this information, the regulator will instigate an investigation of the problem, to determine an appropriate remedy. This paper investigates the incentives facing agents to promote excessive investigation and postpone remediation. Our incomplete information game-theoretic model may be of general interest to game theorists: we apply a new theorem guaranteeing pure-strategy equilibria and introduce a class of games called " aggregation games" which have interesting properties and are widely applicable.

Recent theoretical work on agricultural contracts has utilized agency theory. Most of this work considers a moral hazard problem, and assumes that producers are homogeneous, so that there is no adverse selection problem. We utilize a sample of producer performance under a broiler production contract to confirm that heterogeneity exists. We model the principal's decision process and test predictions regarding how heterogeneity will affect the principal's decisions. We attempt to differentiate between symmetric and asymmetric information cases. We find some support for our hypotheses, including evidence that adverse selection may affect the processor's decisions.

In the past several years, the seed industry worldwide has been dramatically restructured, mostly through mergers and acquisitions. We argue that the restructuring has been technologically driven, and has also resulted in the transformation of several chemical conglomerates into life-sciences firms. We discuss why the restructuring has mostly occurred through mergers rather than contractual relationships such as licensing, and investigate its efficiency implications, both as it concerns anticompetitive effects and the joint use of complementary assets.

This paper studies the incentives facing Potentially Responsible Parties at a hazardous waste site to promote excessive investigation of the site and thus postpone the beginning of the remediation phase of the cleanup. We model the problem as an incomplete information, simultaneous-move game between PRPs. We assume that PRP's liability shares are predetermined. Each PRP's type is its private information about the precision of its own records relating to the site. A strategy for a PRP is a function mapping its type into announced levels of precision. Once types have been realized, the regulator aggregates the realized precision announcements and imposes the investigation schedule according to a predetermined policy function. We show that a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium exists, in which each PRP's strategy is monotone increasing in its type. We prove that PRPs with higher liability shares have greater incentives to delay than those with lower shares. We also show that under certain conditions, when liability shares become more homogeneous, delay becomes more likely. We demonstrate that when certain conditions are imposed on our model, it predicts that two widespread practices--de minimis buyouts and the formation of steering committees--will tend to increase delay.

We build a bargaining-theoretic model of an important dilemma inherent in any major political economic transition process. While swiftly removing the old order is a necessary condition for a successful transition, it also leads to widespread social disruption that may threaten the viability of the reform process. This issue lies at the heart of much of the "big-bang/gradualism" debate in the literature. We argue that this dichotomy is overly simplistic. In particular, the debate, as it has been framed, has failed to capture the significance of interest group competition. Interest group competition matters precisely because the political environment during a transition is fluid and malleable and is thus open to manipulation by interests seeking to mold post-transition governance structures to best serve themselves. As different economic and political structures will give rise to different incentives within these interest groups, one might expect that transition strategies will differ across societies. We show this is the case with two interesting examples. First, we consider how transition strategies differ in open and closed economies. We are able to derive a number of strong results, the most striking of which identifies conditions under which closed economies outperform open economies in terms of social welfare. Our second set of experiments examines Krueger's (1993) "vicious and virtuous circles" theory of policy reform. We identify conditions under which societies with political systems that reward rent-seeking behavior enjoy higher social welfare than societies with political systems that reward productive behavior.

Privatization and market liberalization are widely considered to be complementary reforms in transition economies. This paper challenges this view and the closely related "big bang" approach to economic reform. Our analysis suggests that when pursued simultaneously, privatization may actually impede the transition process following market liberalization and reduce social welfare. Our result is based on an explicit model of market learning, which is a vital component of the economic transition process. Compared to a fully-functioning market in a mature market economy, a market in transition is characterized by greater uncertainty regarding market conditions, including free market equilibrium levels of prices and quantities. Market participants must learn about these conditions through their participation in the market process. When the effects of learning are incorporated into the analysis, the optimal level of privatization decreases monotonically as the level of uncertainty increases.

The Bulgarian land reform process is burdened by a fundamental tension between disruption and continuity. This tension arises from the dual roles played by the nomenklatura in the transition to a market economy. Both roles stem from their privileged status in the old order. While the nomenklatura have the potential to provide the agricultural sector with indispensable human capital, they also have the' potential to extract rents from the sector, thus undermining its competitiveness. Both the productivity of nomenklatura capital and their capacity to extract rents are diminished to the extent that the reform disrupts the established agrarian order. Thus in order to succeed, the agrarian reform process must sail between Scylla and Charybdis. Too much disruption degrades economic productivity, possibly to the extent of threatening the viability of the reform movement itself. Too much continuity skews the distribution of political power in favor of the nomenklatura, which may undermine the competitiveness of the nascent free market institutions. This chapter develops a formal political-economic model of this trade-off. The model challenges the conventional political economic wisdom that decoupling politics from economics will improve economic performance. In particular, we identify conditions under which the quality of the transition is enhanced by coupling the nomenklatura's acquisition of political power to the magnitude of the rents that they extract.

This paper extends the Stahl-Rubinstein model of bilateral bargaining to incorporate many players and multidimensional issue spaces. A central feature of our framework is that in each round of negotiations, a proposer is selected randomly. Our bargaining model consists of a sequence of finite-horizon games, in which the horizon increases without bound. A solution to our model is a limit of equilibrium outcomes for the finite horizon games. A necessary condition for existence of a deterministic solution is that the limit outcome belongs to the core of the underlying bargaining problem. Solutions, if they exist, are generically unique. Two sets of sufficiency conditions for existence are presented. The paper concludes with examples and applications. In particular, we consider bipolar negotiations between two factions, and show that there is a positive relationship between the cohesiveness of one faction relative to the other and its effectiveness in securing the common goals to its members.

An analysis of factors contributing to the cleanup delays at Superfund sites showed discounting, risk-aversion and compensation for off-site damages limiting the ability of government agencies and potentially responsible parties in responding to a timely manner. This is due to the lump-sum transfer mechanism used in Superfund, which when analyzed on a Bayesian mechanism for information transfer, results in an information assymetry that induces non-action due to the effect of liability shares on the cleanup decision.

Byline: Kathy Baylis, Gordon C. Rausser, Leo K. Simon The challenge for any trade agreement is to be adaptable enough to enable countries to address legitimate non-trade concerns (NTC) while being restrictive enough to limit harm to other countries and to assist the creation of free international markets. In this paper, we focus on how environmental NTC have been addressed in agricultural policy in the USA and the European Union (EU) and the resulting implications for trade agreements. For example, programmes in the USA discourage production on environmentally sensitive land, while the EU encourages extensive production. While these and other differences will affect production and trade, the different approaches to agri-environmental policy affect the degree to which the two regions can use agri-environmental policy to offset commodity payments. This difference in flexibility will, in turn, affect how easily the two regions can accept a trade agreement that mandates greater reductions in trade-distorting price supports.