Aristotelis Boukouras

An Ordinal Game Theory Approach to the Analysis and Selection of Partners in Public---Private Partnership Projects

Nowadays, public–private partnership projects have become a standard for delivering public services in both developed and developing countries. In this paper, we are concerned with the analysis of private sector proposals and the selection of the private sector partner to whom to award the contract. To the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been addressed within a game theory framework. To fill this gap, we model this decision problem as a static non-cooperative game of complete information and propose a new ordinal game theory algorithm for finding an optimal generalized Nash equilibrium. The proposed algorithm determines a single ranking of proposals or bidders that takes account of multiple performance criteria and reflects both the public sector and the private sector perspectives, and can handle any number of private sector players and any number of contractual terms. An illustrative scenario is provided to guide the reader through the workings of the proposed ordinal game theory algorithm. The proposed ordinal game theory-based analysis framework can be used by the private sector to analyse any set of potential proposals most likely to be submitted by bidders and to assist with the choice of bidding strategies, and by the public sector player to analyse any set of potential proposals most likely to be submitted under any set of contractual terms and to assist with the choice of a realistic set of contractual terms and their performance measures.

Contract Law and Development

We relate the design of contract law to the process of development. Contract law defines which private agreements are enforceable and which are not. Specifically, we consider an economy where agents face a hold-up problem. The resulting time-inconsistency problem leads to inefficiently low levels of effort and trading among agents. The solution to this problem requires a social contract which meets two conditions: (i) a judge responsible for the enforcement of the social contract and (ii) a set of non-enforceable private contracts. However, because this mechanism is costly, it is infeasible in the early stages of development. The appearance of enforcement institutions and regulation is delayed for the later stages. At this point of time, the hold-up problem is solved and this spurs economic growth further. Finally, the relationship between economic development and the evolution of contract law may be non-monotonic, which may explain why empirical studies fail to find a robust relationship between the two.

Separation of Powers, Political Competition and Ecient Provision of Public Goods

In this paper we provide a political game where agents decide whether to become legislators or politicians. Legislators determine the political institutions constraining politicians’ behavior and politicians compete for gaining the power to make decisions about the level of the public good. We derive the following results: i) Political competition is a necessary but not a sucient condition for the elimination of political rents. ii) Agents utilize the separation of powers in order to endogenously select institutions which restrict the power of politicians. iii) In conjunction with political competition, these institutions implement the Lindahl allocation in the economy as a sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium of the political game. iv) As a consequence of the previous result, political rents are zero in equilibrium, in the sense that the winning politician does not extract part of the social surplus because of his power. To the best of our knowledge, this in the only citizen-candidate model with this equilibrium property.

Frictions to Political Competition and Financial Openness

In this paper we present a political economy approach in order to explain the degree of financial openness for an economy. In the model, entrepreneurs, who may have good or bad projects, vote for policies, which are proposed by selfi sh politicians. Two political frictions (ideological adherence and a super- majority requirement) impair political competition and lead to equilibria, where politicians receive corruption bribes. Furthermore, the model implies a non-monotonic relationship between financial openness and corruption and a positive relationship between financial openness and government size. Some of the model predictions are consistent with empirical findings while other predictions have not beeen tested yet.

Capitalist Spirit and the Markets: Why Income Inequality Matters

I develop a simple static general equilibrium model with capitalist-spirit preferences and prices set by firm owners (entrepreneurs). The model’s pure symmetric Nash equilibria differ markedly from the canonical model: (i) A positive output gap and unemployment may emerge in equilibrium, despite the absence of price rigidities or information asymmetries. (ii) Income and wealth inequality affect equilibrium prices and employment. (iii) The model generates ambiguous comparative statics. Specifically, an increase in inequality of either type may reduce employment and increase the output gap of the economy, while productivity reductions may have the opposite effect. As a result, minimum wage policies may increase employment. These results provide some justification for a number of arguments used in public debates.

The Price Distribution and Technological Shocks in Markets with Endogenous Search Intensity

We provide a simple model that relates the search intensity of households for products to the price distribution and the wage. Households decide how much time to spend on work and on search for finding better deals in a market where firms charge different prices. Thus, the equilibrium price distribution and the wage depend on the endogenous search intensity and labor supply. Moreover, we show that positive technological shocks, which reduce price posting costs for firms, lead to an increase in labor supply, wages and to the average price, while they lead to a decrease in search effort. These results are consistent with recent empirical findings.

Renegotiation-Blocking Through Financial Claims

Renegotiation of contractual agreements may lead to distortion of ex-ante incentives and inefficiencies. However, this problems can be circumvented in a credible way by the use of financial claims. The contracting parties ask financial markets (external claimants) to issue financial claims which are redeemable in the event of renegotiation. If the contracting parties do not know exactly how many claims have been issued, then this source of asymmetric information causes the failure of any renegotiation attempt. Moreover, by construction, the renegotiation blocking process does not generate additional inefficiency.

Separation of Ownership and Control: Delegation as a Commitment Device

This paper provides a theoretical model for explaining the separation of ownership and control in firms. An entrepreneur hires a worker for providing eff ort to complete a project. The workers eff ort determines the probability that the project is completed on time, but the worker receives unobservable bene fits for every period she is employed. We show that hiring a manager on a short-term contract may increase the firm value and we identify the conditions under which separation of ownership and control is optimal. The model is consistent with empirical fi ndings.

Information Aggregation and Adverse Selection

We consider a general economy, where agents have private information about their types. Types can be multi-dimensional and potentially interdependent. We show that, if the interim distribution of types is common knowledge (the exact number of agents for each type is known), then a mechanism exists, which is consistent with truthful revelation of private information and which implements first-best allocations of resources as the unique Bayes-Nash equilibrium. Our result requires weak restrictions on preferences (Local Non-Common Indiff erence Property) and on the Pareto correspondence (Anonymity) and it is robust to small perturbations regarding the knowledge of the interim distribution. Our paper is useful in understanding the power of information aggregation in alleviating incentive constraints and is particularly pertinent to games with large populations, in which case the interim distribution of types converges to a unique distribution.

Political Competition, Ideology and Corruption

This paper presents a model of political competition, where voter decisions are affected by their ideological adherence to political parties. We derive a number of interesting results: First, we show that an equilibrium exists even though voting is fully deterministic. Second, although politicians, because of deterministic voting, can win an election with certainty by making concessions to voters, they choose to win the election only with some probability in order to maximize their expected rents. Third, if the distribution of ideology is asymmetric, then political parties follow different platforms in equilibrium. Finally, our model generates two novel empirical predicitions, which, to the best of our knowledge, have not been tested yet: i) the higher the ideological adherence to a political party the more inefficient policies this party will follow, ii) the higher the number of extra votes required for election victory (the super-majority requirement) the higher the degree of corruption.