infonet-economy

"This paper extends the convergence result on Bayesian learning in Kalai and Lehrern(1993a, 1993b) to a class of games where players have a payoff function continuous for the product topology. Provided that 1) every player maximizes her expected payoff against her own beliefs, 2) every player updates her beliefs in a Bayesian manner, and 3) prior beliefs other players’...

World governance today is characterized by international organizations lacking democratic legitimacy and control by the citizens they claim to represent. They are also criticized for being inefficient. This leads to violent protests and to NGOs having great influence. To address these problems, we propose international governance base on the democratic idea of citizen participation:...

In small groups norm enforcement is provided by mutual punishment and reward. In large societies we have enforcement institutions. This paper shows how such institutions can emerge as a decentralized equilibrium. In a first stage, individuals invest in a public enforcement technology. This technology generates a sanctioning system whose effectiveness depends on the aggregate amount...

We report survey and experimental evidence on trust and voluntary cooperation from more than 630 non-student and student participants in rural and urban Russia. Our subjects have a diverse socioeconomic background that we relate to the answers of a survey on trust attitudes and to contribution behavior in a one-shot public goods game. We find that the socio-economic background...

Recent years have seen a proliferation of preferential trading agreements, with certain nations signing a sequence of agreements over time. This latter fact raises the question as to what factors determine the sequence of trade agreements that a nation, or group of nations, enters into. Drawing upon both long-standing European experience and recent developments in East Asia, this...

In this paper the approach of Constitutional Economics is presented and some of its applications are shown. First, the concept of the original position (constitutional convention) with its informational restrictions and the unanimity rule are discussed. Next, the exchange paradigm which lies behind the whole approach and the role of the self-interest assumption are discussed. Then it...

Mit dem WTO-Abkommen trat am 1. Januar 1995 ein neues Streitschlichtungsverfahren für das multilaterale Handelssystem in Kraft. Der neue Mechanismus brachte eine stärkere Regelorientierung bei der Beilegung von Handelsstreitigkeiten. Nach zehn Jahren Anwendung kann sich die Zwischenbilanz sehen lassen: Das Verfahren wird von den Mitgliedern rege genutzt, und auch die...

First, the problem of defining the government size and theoretical considerations about the relation between this size and economic growth are discussed. Then the international comparative empirical literature as well as the one discussing the Swiss situation are reviewed. Neither of them comes to firm conclusions. One reason for this is that in international cross-section as well as...

This paper purports to develop a simple microeconomic model designed to shed light on behavioral change induced by improved information about smoking risks. It predicts the conditions in which improved information indeed increases the demand for cigarettes. After recalling the economic rationale of an anti-tobacco policy, the article points out a few startling implications of...