Kirill Pogorelskiy

Distribution of Power within the IMF: When Does Preference Mean Voice?

Using the preference-based approach to power analysis of the International Monetary Fund from Aleskerov, Kalyagin & Pogorelskiy (2008), which allows for estimating the power of the IMF members within the Executive Board and the Fund in general through the existing constituency system, we explore a new model of members’ preferences to coalesce. The preferences in this model are based on the data on countries’ bilateral trade. The present results of voting power analysis (as of May 2009) are compared with those produced by the classical power indices by Banzhaf and Penrose. We show that the greater the majority voting rule, the more the preferences to coalesce matter for countries with a small number of votes.

TESTING THE QUANTAL RESPONSE HYPOTHESIS: TESTING THE QUANTAL RESPONSE HYPOTHESIS

We develop a nonparametric test for consistency of player behavior with the quantal response equilibrium (QRE). The test exploits a characterization of the equilibrium choice probabilities in any structural QRE as the gradient of a convex function; thereby, QRE‐consistent choices satisfy the cyclic monotonicity inequalities. Our testing procedure utilizes recent econometric results for moment inequality models. We assess our test using lab experimental data from a series of generalized matching pennies games. We reject the QRE hypothesis in the pooled data but cannot reject individual‐level quantal response behavior for over half of the subjects.

Skewness, Tax Progression, and Demand for Redistribution : Evidence from the UK

We introduce a skewness-based approach to measure tax progression and demand for redistribution. Adapting a novel, quantile-based statistical measure of skewness to right-skewed income distributions, we uncover its political economy foundation, by simultaneously relating the same measure to the classical model of income redistribution due to Meltzer and Richard (1981), to the Prospect Of Upward Mobility (POUM) mechanism due to Benabou and Ok (2001), and to the progressivity of a tax schedule. In an empirical analysis of UK income distributions in 1979 { 2013, we find that skewness has increased over time, with the rich moving further away from the median. While the magnitude of the increase has remained small enough so that observed redistribution (or lack thereof ) could be consistent with POUM hypothesis, more recent periods show an increase in tax progression.

News Sharing and Voting on Social Networks: An Experimental Study

More voters than ever get political news from their friends on social media platforms. Is this bad for democracy? Using context-neutral laboratory experiments, we find that biased (mis)information shared on social networks affects the quality of collective decisions relatively more than does segregation by political preferences on social media. Two features of subject behavior underlie this finding: 1) they share news signals selectively, revealing signals favorable to their candidates more often than unfavorable signals; 2) they na¨ively take signals at face value and account for neither the selection in the selection in the shared signals nor the differential informativeness of news signals across different sources.