Work/Family Policies,The Changing Role of Fathers and The Presumption of Shared Responsibility for Parenting

Recent approaches to work/family policies which emphasise options for women have the potential to reinforce gender divisions of labour and to increase conflicts between paid work and family. It is argued here that more account needs to be taken of the interaction between male and female commitments to work and family, and of the possible increased involvement by men in family life. The movement away from the traditional role as the autocratic head of the household towards a more nurturant and available father role, while still small, appears to be gathering momentum. This is reflected in recent research findings, in newspaper articles and other media reports, and in proposals for changes in employment policies (e.g., the ACTU “family leave” test case). While research and everyday accounts provide some hope for future changes in gender divisions of labour, more caution needs to be taken in interpreting research findings and in making statements about the extent to which change has already occurred. A radical new direction in approaches to policy development is needed if the existing status quo of father as the major breadwinner and more distant family member, and mother as the housewife, nurturer and supplementary income earner, is to be altered. Suggestions are made for the development of policies that would both respond to the needs of fathers who are primary caregivers, and help promote a greater sharing of parenting responsibilities by fathers. The basis of these proposals is an argument for the adoption of a presumption of shared parenting to parallel the current presumption of gender equality in the paid workforce.     

Robust Confidence Regions for Incomplete Models

Call an economic model incomplete if it does not generate a probabilistic prediction even given knowledge of all parameter values. We propose a method of inference about unknown parameters for such models that is robust to heterogeneity and dependence of unknown form. The key is a Central Limit Theorem for belief functions; robust confidence regions are then constructed in a fashion paralleling the classical approach. Monte Carlo simulations support tractability of the method and demonstrate its enhanced robustness relative to existing methods.     

Optimal Dynamic Pricing of Perishable Items by a Monopolist Facing Strategic Consumers

We introduce a dynamic pricing model for a monopolistic company selling a perishable product to a finite population of strategic consumers (customers who are aware that pricing is dynamic and may time their purchases strategically). This problem is modeled as a stochastic dynamic game in which the company's objective is to maximize total expected revenues, and each customer maximizes the expected present value of utility. We prove the existence of a unique subgame‐perfect equilibrium pricing policy, provide equilibrium optimality conditions for both customer and seller, and prove monotonicity results for special cases. We demonstrate through numerical examples that a company that ignores strategic consumer behavior may receive much lower total revenues than one that uses the strategic equilibrium pricing policy. We also show that, when the initial capacity is a decision variable, it can be used together with the appropriate pricing policy to effectively reduce the impact of strategic consumer behavior. The proposed model is computationally tractable for problems of realistic size.     

Common Value Auctions with Insider Information

Bidding is studied in first-price common value auctions where an insider is better informed than other bidders (outsiders) about the value of the item. With inexperienced bidders, having an insider does not materially reduce the severity of the winner's curse compared to auctions with a symmetric information structure (SIS). In contrast, super-experienced bidders, who have largely overcome the winner's curse, satisfy the comparative static predictions of equilibrium bidding theory: (i) average seller's revenue is larger with an insider than in SIS auctions, (ii) insiders make substantially greater profits, conditional on winning, than outsiders, and (iii) insiders increase their bids in response to more rivals. Further, changes in insiders' bids are consistent with directional learning theory (Selten and Buchta (1994)).