Economic Theory

This paper sets out a tractable model which illuminates problems relating to individual bank behaviour, to possible contagious inter-relationships between banks, and to the appropriate design of prudential requirements and incentives to limit ‘excessive’ risk-taking. Our model is rich enough to include heterogeneous agents, endogenous default, and multiple commodity, and credit and deposit markets. Yet, it is simple enough to be effectively computable and can therefore be used as a practical framework to analyse financial fragility. Financial fragility in our model emerges naturally as an equilibrium phenomenon. Among other results, a non-trivial quantity theory of money is derived, liquidity and default premia co-determine interest rates, and both regulatory and monetary policies have non-neutral effects. The model also indicates how monetary policy may affect financial fragility, thus highlighting the trade-off between financial stability and economic efficiency.

We apply the dynamic stochastic framework proposed in recent evolutionary literature to a class of coordination games played simultaneously by the entire population. In these games payoffs, and hence best replies, are determined by a summary statistic of the population strategy profile. We demonstrate that with simultaneous play, the equilibrium selection depends crucially on how best responses to the summary statistic remain piece-wise constant. In fact, all the strict Nash equilibria in the underlying stage game can be made stochastically stable depending on how the best response mapping generates piece-wise constant best responses.

We propose an endogenous growth model with offshoring to investigate its effects on product innovation and growth in the country of origin. Offshoring is associated with reduced feedback from offshored plants to domestic labs as well as coordination problems between the offshored and domestic divisions of firms. Production and transport cost parameters affect the static decision to relocate plants but not R&D. Hence, offshoring may be chosen by firms when it damages the growth rate of their countries of origin. In particular, if offshoring reduces the feedback from plants to labs, it is likely to bring dynamic losses when the countries of origin are large, especially in sectors in which R&D is cheap and product differentiation is strong. It is also likely to slow growth in sectors in which contractual incompleteness gives a strong bargaining power to offshored divisions in intra-firm transactions.

We consider a pure exchange economy with asymmetric information where individual behavior exhibits ambiguity aversion along the line of maximin expected utility decision making. For such economies, we introduce different notions of maximin value allocations. We also introduce a strong notion of incentive compatibility. We prove the existence and incentive compatibility of the maximin value allocation. We conclude that unlike the Bayesian value allocation approach in Krasa Yannelis (Econometrica 62(4):881–900, 1994), incentive compatibility is related to efficiency rather than to direct exchange of information.

We present an axiomatization of expected utility from the frequentist perspective. It starts with a preference relation on the set of infinite sequences with limit relative frequencies. We consider three axioms parallel to the ones for the von Neumann–Morgenstern (vN–M) expected utility theory. Limit relative frequencies correspond to probability values in lotteries in the vN–M theory. This correspondence is used to show that each of our axioms is equivalent to the corresponding vN–M axiom in the sense that the former is an exact translation of the latter. As a result, a representation theorem is established: The preference relation is represented by an average of utilities with weights given by the relative frequencies.

We study a variation of the one-sector stochastic optimal growth model with independent and identically distributed shocks where agents acquire information that enables them to accurately predict the next period’s productivity shock (but not shocks in later periods). Optimal policy depends on the forthcoming shock. A “better” predicted realization of the shock that increases both marginal and total product always increases next period’s optimal output. We derive conditions on the degree of relative risk aversion and the elasticity of marginal product under which optimal investment increases or decreases with a better shock. Under fairly regular restrictions, optimal outputs converge in distribution to a unique invariant distribution whose support is bounded away from zero. We derive explicit solutions to the optimal policy for three well-known families of production and utility functions and use these to show that volatility of output, sensitivity of output to shocks, and expected total investment may be higher or lower than in the standard model where no new information is acquired over time; the limiting steady state may also differ significantly from that in the standard model.

The impact of information dissemination and experimentation on dynamic adverse selection in noisy agency relationships is examined. Significant deviations in terms of equilibrium actions and payments occur, when compared to deterministic environments. Information dissipates slowly, so payments to agents who stand to lose informational rents over time are lower than compared to deterministic settings. Moreover, the principal manipulates the agent's actions to affect the informativeness of the signal. Thus, the principal trades-off lower initial payments with higher informational rents later. Simultaneously, the principal manipulates the signal distribution to enhance his ability to learn about the agent's type.

We provide a complete characterization of the set of Markov-Perfect Equilibria (MPE) of dynamic common-property resource games a la Levhari and Mirman (1980). We find that all MPE of such games exhibit remarkably regular dynamic behavior. Surprisingly, however, and despite their memoryless nature, MPE need not result in a “tragedy of the commons”, i.e., overexploitation of the resource relative to the first-best solutions. We show through an example that MPE could, in fact, lead to the reverse phenomenon of underexploitation of the resource. Nonetheless, we demonstrate that, in pay off space, MPE are always suboptimal.