Monisankar Bishnu

Linking consumption externalities with optimal accumulation of human and physical capital and intergenerational transfers

This paper opens a new perspective from which one can explain the presence of government intervention in education even in the absence of human capital externality. It argues that consumption externalities can provide rationale for government intervention in education. Within the context of overlapping generations economy, it has also been shown that competitive equilibrium either underaccumulates both physical and human capital or overaccumulates both. Thus the result rules out the possibility of competitive equilibrium deviating from the social optimum in its allocation of physical and human capital in opposite directions. Immediate policy issues have also been discussed.

Hierarchy of players in swap robust voting games

Ordinarily, the process of decision making by a committee through voting is modeled by a monotonic game the range of whose characteristic function is restricted to {0, 1}. The decision rule that governs the collective action of a voting body induces a hierarchy in the set of players in terms of the a-priori influence that the players have over the decision making process. In order to determine this hierarchy in a swap robust game, one has to either evaluate a power index (e.g., the Shapley–Shubik index, the Banzhaf–Coleman index) for each player or conduct a pairwise comparison between players, whereby a player i is ranked higher than another player j if there exists a coalition in which i is more desirable as a coalition partner than j. In this paper, we outline an alternative mechanism to determine the ranking of players in terms of their a-priori power. This simple and elegant method uses only minimal winning coalitions, rather than the entire set of winning coalitions.