Individual fairness in Harsanyi’s utilitarianism: operationalizing all-inclusive utility

Fairness can be incorporated into Harsanyi’s utilitarianism through all-inclusive utility. This retains the normative assumptions of expected utility and Pareto-efficiency, and relates fairness to individual preferences. It makes utilitarianism unfalsifiable, however, if agents’ all-inclusive utilities are not explicitly specified. This note proposes a two-stage model to make utilitarian welfare analysis falsifiable by specifying all-inclusive utilities explicitly through models of individual fairness preferences. The approach is applied to include fairness in widely discussed allocation examples.     

环境税改革与绿色增长:欧洲视角

欧洲的环境税改革可以追溯到20世纪90年代初,但自2001年起却经历了一个持续的发展低谷阶段,而最近,日益严厉的碳减排目标和众多欧洲政府通过税收来减少公共赤字的需要相结合,正在促成人们对碳/能源税和环境税改革兴趣的再度提升。本文的基本观点是,环境税改革是一种促进绿色增长的政策,也就是带来在欧洲和其他地方的环境可持续的经济增长,而欧洲范围内的环境税改革是欧盟实现2020年减排目标十分有效而经济的手段,尤其是在全球性气候合作的背景下。此外,它还可以用来提高一般意义上的资源利用效率。环境税改革是欧洲应对全球气候变化的一个巨大政策机遇,它不仅代价较低,而且有助于就业、技术革新和可以长期经济发展的新工业,而这些都是来自公共政策的巨大收益。因而,环境税改革理应成为实现温室气体大幅度削减目标的政策工具组合中的重要组成部分。当然,这有赖于欧盟政治家和决策者找到应对环境税改革可能引致的诸多政治挑战的方法,从而代表欧洲实现这一改革的预期收益。     

MONITORING IN TEAMS: USING LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS TO STUDY A THEORY OF THE FIRM

Alchian and Demsetz’s influential explanation of the classical business firm (The American Economic Review, 1972, 62, 777–795) argues that there is need for a concentrated residual claim in the hands of a central agent, to motivate the monitoring of workers. We model monitoring as a way to transform team production from a collective action dilemma with strong free riding incentives to a productivity‐enhancing opportunity with strong private marginal incentives to contribute effort. In an experiment, we have subjects experience team production without monitoring, team production with a central monitor, and team production with peer monitoring. Then subjects vote on whether to employ the central monitor, who gets to keep a fixed share of the team output, or to rely on peer monitoring, which entails a coordination or free riding problem. Our subjects usually prefer peer monitoring but they switch to the specialist when unable to successfully self‐monitor. We provide evidence for situations in which team members resist the appointing of a central monitor and succeed in overcoming coordination and free riding problems as well as for a situation in which an Alchian–Demsetz‐like firm grows in the laboratory.     

Caveat Venditor? Museum Merchandising, Nonprofit Commercialization, and the Case of the Metropolitan Museum in New York

This paper reviews some of the underpinnings of the current commercialization debate in the nonprofit sector, based on an analysis of Metropolitan Museum of Art data from 1960 to 2002. The case suggests at least two avenues for additional research: First, while analysts tend to see the origins of the commercialization phenomenon in the fiscal setbacks of the 1980s, the economic crisis of the 1970s and the resulting erosion of endowment funds may also have been an as of yet unexplored driving force behind the commercialization trend. Second, current conceptual frameworks of the phenomenon adequately explain the motivations behind the observable rise of the museum's commercial activities. However, the changing rationales as well as economic fortunes of commercial activities in this case highlight the need for a better understanding of the long-term effects and consequences of commercial activity by nonprofit organizations, particularly in light of the current push for increased entrepreneurialism.

Aspirations,Segregation, and Occupational Choice

This paper examines the steady states of an overlapping generations economy with a given distribution of household locations over a one‐dimensional interval. Parents decide whether or not to educate their children. Educational decisions are affected by location: There are local complementarities in investment incentives stemming from aspirations formation, learning spillovers, or local public goods. At the same time, economy‐wide wages endogenously adjust to bring factor supplies into line with demand. The model therefore combines local social interaction with global market interaction. The paper studies steady‐state configurations of skill acquisition, both with and without segregation. The model is used to compare macroeconomic and welfare properties of segregated and unsegregated steady states. (JEL: D31, O15, D85)     

Stationen eines Coaching im ärztlichen Bereich Eine Fallstudie mit hypothetischen Beratungssituationen

Stages of a coaching in the medical area. A case study with hypothetical counseling situations This article presents typical points of a career in the medical field in Germany, structured by hypothetical coaching interventions including thorough methodological reflections. Career counseling, analysis of the organizational chart and culture as well as conflict counseling constitute the main focus of this paper. Creative methods such as painting and use of hand puppets supplement the therapeutic methods discussed, such as Socratic dialogue, role play exercises and an analysis of a sibling constellation.     

Semidefinite Programming Relaxations for the Quadratic Assignment Problem

Semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) are derived using the dual of the (homogenized) Lagrangian dual of appropriate equivalent representations of QAP. These relaxations result in the interesting, special, case where only the dual problem of the SDP relaxation has strict interior, i.e., the Slater constraint qualification always fails for the primal problem. Although there is no duality gap in theory, this indicates that the relaxation cannot be solved in a numerically stable way. By exploring the geometrical structure of the relaxation, we are able to find projected SDP relaxations. These new relaxations, and their duals, satisfy the Slater constraint qualification, and so can be solved numerically using primal-dual interior-point methods.For one of our models, a preconditioned conjugate gradient method is used for solving the large linear systems which arise when finding the Newton direction. The preconditioner is found by exploiting the special structure of the relaxation. See e.g., Vandenverghe and Boyd (1995) for a similar approach for solving SDP problems arising from control applications.Numerical results are presented which indicate that the described methods yield at least competitive lower bounds.     

Grouped data exponentially weighted moving average control charts

In the manufacture of metal fasteners in a progressive die operation, and other industrial situations, important quality dimensions cannot be measured on a continuous scale, and manufactured parts are classified into groups by using a step gauge. This paper proposes a version of exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control charts that are applicable to monitoring the grouped data for process shifts. The run length properties of this new grouped data EWMA chart are compared with similar results previously obtained for EWMA charts for variables data and with those for cumulative sum (CUSUM) schemes based on grouped data. Grouped data EWMA charts are shown to be nearly as efficient as variables-based EWMA charts and are thus an attractive alternative when the collection of variables data is not feasible. In addition, grouped data EWMA charts are less affected by the discreteness that is inherent in grouped data than are grouped data CUSUM charts. In the metal fasteners application, grouped data EWMA charts were simple to implement and allowed the rapid detection of undesirable process shifts.