Economics

We study search, evaluation, and selection of candidates of unknown quality for a position. We examine the effects of "soft" affirmative action policies increasing the relative percentage of minority candidates in the candidate pool. We show that, while meant to encourage minority hiring, such policies may backfire if the evaluation of minority candidates is noisier than that of non-minorities. This may occur even if minorities are at least as qualified and as valuable as non-minorities. The results provide a possible explanation for why certain soft affirmative action policies have proved counterproductive, even in the absence of (implicit) biases.

The possibility of re-switching of techniques in Piero Sraffa's intersectoral model, namely the returning capital-intensive techniques with monotonic changes in the profit rate, is traditionally considered as a paradox putting at stake the viability of the neoclassical theory of production. It is argued here that this phenomenon can be rationalized within the neoclassical paradigm. Sectoral interdependencies can give rise to non-monotonic effects of progressive variations in income distribution on relative prices. The re-switching of techniques is, therefore, the result of cost-minimizing technical choices facing returning ranks of relative input prices in full consistency with the neoclassical perspective.

In this paper, we propose and analyse two game theoretical models useful to design marketing channels attribution mechanisms based on cooperative TU games and bankruptcy problems, respectively. First, we analyse the Sum Game, a coalitional game introduced by Morales (2016). We extend the ideas introduced in Zhao et al. (2018) and Cano-Berlanga et al. (2017) to the case in which the order and the repetition of channels on the paths to conversion are taken into account. In all studied cases, the Shapley value is proposed as the attribution mechanism. Second, a bankruptcy problem approach is proposed, and a similar analysis is developed relying on the Constrained Equal Loss (CEL) and Proportional (PROP) rules as attribution mechanisms. In particular, it is relevant to note that the class of attribution bankruptcy problems is a proper subclass of bankruptcy problems.

We introduce and study the property of orthogonal independence, a restricted additivity axiom applying when alternatives are orthogonal. The axiom requires that the preference for one marginal change over another should be maintained after each marginal change has been shifted in a direction that is orthogonal to both. We show that continuous preferences satisfy orthogonal independence if and only if they are spherical: their indifference curves are spheres with the same center, with preference being "monotone" either away or towards the center. Spherical preferences include linear preferences as a special (limiting) case. We discuss different applications to economic and political environments. Our result delivers Euclidean preferences in models of spatial voting, quadratic welfare aggregation in social choice, and expected utility in models of choice under uncertainty.

The behavior of complex systems is one of the most intriguing phenomena investigated by recent science; natural and artificial systems offer a wide opportunity for this kind of analysis. The energy conversion is both a process based on important physical laws and one of the most important economic sectors; the interaction between these two aspects of energy production suggests the possibility to apply some of the approaches of the dynamic systems' analysis. In particular, a phase plot, which is one of the methods to detect a correlation between quantities in a complex system, provides a good way to establish qualitative analogies between the ecological systems and the economic ones and may shed light on the processes governing the evolution of the system. The aim of this paper is to highlight the analogies between some peculiar characteristics of the oil production vs. price and show in which way such characteristics are similar to some behavioral mechanisms found in Nature.

This paper develops a framework for repeated matching markets. The model departs from the Gale-Shapley matching model by having a fixed set of long-lived hospitals match with a new generation of short-lived residents in every period. I show that there are two kinds of hospitals in this repeated environment: some hospitals can be motivated dynamically to voluntarily reduce their hiring capacity, potentially making more residents available to rural hospitals; the others, however, are untouchable even with repeated interaction and must obtain the same match as they do in a static matching. In large matching markets with correlated preferences, at most a vanishingly small fraction of the hospitals are untouchable. The vast majority of hospitals can be motivated using dynamic incentives.

A monopolist sells items repeatedly over time to a consumer with persistent private information. The seller has limited commitment: she cannot commit to a long-term contract but always has the option to commit to posted prices for unsold items. A pricing strategy is static if it is history-independent. We show that the seller adopts static pricing in equilibrium. The ratchet effect eliminates potential gains from dynamic pricing for any degree of persistence of the private information.

We introduce and study a model of long-run convention formation for rare interactions. Players in this model form beliefs by observing a recency-weighted sample of past interactions, to which they noisily best respond. We propose a continuous state Markov model, well-suited for our setting, and develop a methodology that is relevant for a larger class of similar learning models. We show that the model admits a unique asymptotic distribution which concentrates its mass on some minimal CURB block configuration. In contrast to existing literature of long-run convention formation, we focus on behavior inside minimal CURB blocks and provide conditions for convergence to (approximate) mixed equilibria conventions inside minimal CURB blocks.

We consider a model of urban spatial structure proposed by Harris and Wilson (Environment and Planning A, 1978). The model consists of fast dynamics, which represent spatial interactions between locations by the entropy-maximizing principle, and slow dynamics, which represent the evolution of the spatial distribution of local factors that facilitate such spatial interactions. One known limitation of the Harris and Wilson model is that it can have multiple locally stable equilibria, leading to a dependence of predictions on the initial state. To overcome this, we employ equilibrium refinement by stochastic stability. We build on the fact that the model is a large-population potential game and that stochastically stable states in a potential game correspond to global potential maximizers. Unlike local stability under deterministic dynamics, the stochastic stability approach allows a unique and unambiguous prediction for urban spatial configurations. We show that, in the most likely spatial configuration, the number of retail agglomerations decreases either when shopping costs for consumers decrease or when the strength of agglomerative effects increases.

We define and investigate a property of mechanisms that we call "strategic simplicity," and that is meant to capture the idea that, in strategically simple mechanisms, strategic choices require limited strategic sophistication. We define a mechanism to be strategically simple if choices can be based on first-order beliefs about the other agents' preferences and first-order certainty about the other agents' rationality alone, and there is no need for agents to form higher-order beliefs, because such beliefs are irrelevant to the optimal strategies. All dominant strategy mechanisms are strategically simple. But many more mechanisms are strategically simple. In particular, strategically simple mechanisms may be more flexible than dominant strategy mechanisms in the bilateral trade problem and the voting problem.