Preference Intensities in Repeated Collective Decision-Making

We study decision rules for committees that repeatedly take a binary decision. Committee members are privately informed about their payoffs and monetary transfers are not feasible. In static environments, the only strategy-proof mechanisms are voting rules which are criticized for being inefficient as they do not condition on preference intensities. The dynamic structure of repeated decision-making allows for richer decision rules that overcome this inefficiency by making use of information on preference intensities. Nonetheless, we show that often simple voting is optimal for two-person committees. This holds for many prior type distributions and irrespective of the agents' patience

Why Voting? A Welfare Analysis

Which decision rule should we use to make a binary collective choice? While voting procedures are applied ubiquitously, they are criticized for being inefficient. Using monetary transfers, efficient choices can be made at the cost of a budget imbalance. Is it optimal to do so? And why are monetary transfers used only rarely in public decision making? We solve for the welfare maximizing social choice function taking monetary transfers explicitly into account. Under a mild regularity assumption on the distribution of types, we show that the optimal anonymous social choice function is implementable through qualified majority voting. Our result shows that using a VCG mechanism is not superior to voting in general and justifies the use of voting mechanisms. It thereby could explain why many decision rules employed in practice do not rely on monetary transfers

Five Essays in Economic Theory

This thesis covers two main areas of microeconomic theory. The first three chapters are contributions to the theory of mechanism design and the last two chapters contribute to the literature on general equilibrium in markets with indivisibilities. Chapter one considers committees deciding collectively between accepting a given proposal and maintaining the status quo. Committee members are privately informed about their valuations and monetary transfers are possible. The social choice function maximizing utilitarian welfare is described, which takes monetary transfers to an external agency explicitly into account. For regular distributions of preferences, it is optimal to exclude monetary transfers and to decide by qualified majority voting. Chapter two studies welfare-optimal decision rules for committees that repeatedly take a binary decision. Again, committee members are privately informed about their payoffs and monetary transfers are not feasible. In static environments, the only strategy-proof mechanisms are voting rules which are inefficient as they do not condition on preference intensities. The dynamic structure of repeated decision-making allows for richer decision rules that overcome this inefficiency. Nonetheless, it is shown that often simple voting is optimal for two-person committees. Chapter three shows that in an independent private value auction environment, welfare-optimal strategy-proof mechanisms never extract any net payments from the agents and have a simple "posted price" or "option" form whenever an increasing hazard rate condition holds. In the bilateral trade environment, optimality of posted price mechanisms can be obtained without any assumption on type distributions. In chapter four, the full substitutes condition used in the trading network model of Hatfield et al. (2013) is generalized to a condition called full substitutes and complements (see Sun and Yang 2006). If all agents' preferences satisfy full substitutes and complements, competitive equilibria can be shown to exist and all desirable results about competitive equilibria carry over to the model with more diverse preferences: The welfare theorems hold and, under the full substitutes and complements condition, competitive equilibrium outcomes are precisely those that are stable. Chapter five applies the theory of Discrete Convex Analysis to economies with indivisibilities in order to derive a simple tâtonnement process for settings where agents have substitutes preferences over heterogeneous goods. Specifically, the price adjustment process discovered by Ausubel (2006) is reinterpreted in terms of a steepest descent algorithm for the minimization of discrete convex functions and generalized to settings that allow agents to be producers and/or consumers of multiple units of goods. The model is applied to the substitutes and complements setting introduced by Sun and Yang (2009), well as the trading network economy of Hatfield et al. (2013)

Optimal Private Good Allocation: The Case for a Balanced Budget

In an independent private value auction environment, we are interested in strategy-proof mechanisms that maximize the agents' residual surplus, that is, the utility derived from the physical allocation minus transfers accruing to an external entity. We find that, under the assumption of an increasing hazard rate of type distributions, an optimal deterministic mechanism never extracts any net payments from the agents, \ie it will be budget-balanced. Specifically, optimal mechanisms have a simple ``posted price'' or ``option'' form. In the bilateral trade environment, we obtain optimality of posted price mechanisms without any assumption on type distributions, thereby providing a rationale for confining attention to budget-balanced mechanisms

Comparative Data Law ::The Munich Global Data Law Conference /

This book contains the proceedings of the conference "Comparative Data Law", which was held in Munich in December 2023. The increasing relevance of data is now recognized all over the world. The large number of regulatory acts and proposals in the field of data law serves as a testament to the significance of data processing for the economies of the world. The European Union's Data Strategy, the African Union's Data Policy Framework and the Australian Data Strategy only serve as examples within a plethora of regulatory actions. Yet, the purposeful and sensible use of data does not only play a role in economic terms, e.g. regarding the welfare or competitiveness of economies. The implications for society and the common good are at least equally relevant. For instance, data processing is an integral part of modern research methodology and can thus help to address the problems the world is facing today, such as climate change. The conference was the third and final event of the Global Data Law Conference Series. Legal scholars from all over the world met, presented and exchanged their experiences on different data-related regulatory approaches. Various instruments and approaches to the regulation of data - personal or non-personal - were discussed, without losing sight of the global effects going hand-in-hand with different kinds of regulation. In compiling the conference proceedings, this book does not only aim at providing a critical and analytical assessment of the status quo of data law in different countries today, it also aims at providing a forward-looking perspective on the pressing issues of our time, such as: How to promote sensible data sharing and purposeful data governance? Under which circumstances, if ever, do data localisation requirements make sense? How - and by whom - should international regulation be put in place? The proceedings engage in a discussion on future-oriented ideas and actions, thereby promoting a constructive and sensible approach to data law around the world

Gross substitutes and complements: a simple generalization

Abstract This paper extends the gross substitutes and complements (GSC) framework o