Three Essays in Economics
Three Essays in Economics

Author: Ran Shao

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 115

ISBN-13:

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This dissertation presents three essays in economics. Firstly, I study the problem of allocating an indivisible good between two agents under incomplete information. I provide a characterization of mechanisms that maximize the sum of the expected utilities of the agents among all feasible strategy-proof mechanisms: Any optimal mechanism must be a convex combination of two fixed price mechanisms and two option mechanisms. Secondly, I study the problem of allocating a non-excludable public good between two agents under incomplete information. An equal-cost sharing mechanism which maximizes the sum of the expected utilities of the agents among all feasible strategy-proof mechanisms is proved to be optimal. Under the equal-cost sharing mechanism, when the built cost is low, the public good is provided whenever one of the agents is willing to fund it at half cost; when the cost is high, the public good is provided only if both agents are willing to fund it. Thirdly, I analyze the problem of matching two heterogeneous populations. If the payoff from a match exhibits complementarities, it is well known that absent any friction positive assortative matching is optimal. Coarse matching refers to a situation in which the populations into a finite number of classes, then randomly matched within these classes. The focus of this essay is the performance of coarse matching schemes with a finite number of classes. The main results of this essay are the following ones. First, assuming a multiplicative match payoff function, I derive a lower bound on the performance of n-class coarse matching under mild conditions on the distributions of agents' characteristics. Second, I prove that this result generalizes to a large class of match payoff functions. Third, I show that these results are applicable to a broad class of applications, including a monopoly pricing problem with incomplete information, as well as to a cost-sharing problem with incomplete information. In these problems, standard models predict that optimal contracts sort types completely. The third result implies that a monopolist can capture a large fraction of the second-best profits by offering pooling contracts with a small number of qualities.

Three Essays on Emerging Issues in Economics
Three Essays on Emerging Issues in Economics

Author: Rik Chakraborti

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 9780355855890

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This dissertation contributes three essays to emerging topics in Economics. The first essay examines the role of institutional weaknesses--specifically, weakly defined or enforced property rights--in keeping poor countries heavily dependent on their natural resource base through trade. The essay shows, theoretically and empirically, that a country with weaker property rights will inefficiently under-price its resource base, and export more resource-based goods even to countries that have equally weak property rights. The second essay explores how a firm’s overconfidence about catastrophic environmental risks influences the optimal contract that a regulator writes to reduce the risk at minimal cost. The results show that overconfidence can matter in two important ways: If the firm overestimates the impact of precautionary effort in reducing risk, the optimal contract attains more environmental protection at lower social costs. If the firm, however, underestimates the impact of precautionary effort, the contract is less efficient. Environmental protection is costlier. Moreover, in this case, ignoring the firm’s overconfidence can lead to excessive risk-taking. The third essay explores the interactive economic dynamics of attention and habit formation in the presence of time-inconsistent preferences in mitigating self-control issues. Recent studies in the psychological literature find that self-control is less about resisting unhealthy temptations, and more about breaking unhealthy habits and replacing them with healthy ones. The essay develops a model of habit formation consistent with this observation. A healthy habit in any given domain, in the model, takes a period of sustained attention to form. But, once established, these healthy habits allow an individual to free up scarce \attentional resources," which can then be used to establish healthy habits in other domains. The model has interesting policy implications. It suggests, among other things, that information campaigns or other policies aimed at preventing unhealthy behaviors are best targeted at individuals whose habits are in flux: freshman college students, for example, or people who have recently moved or changed jobs. It also suggests that such policies might have counter-intentional consequences: taxing cigarettes might lead to wide-spread obesity through the channel of cross-domain self-control failures.