Showing papers on "Excludability published in 2015"

Knowledge as Global Public Good

Abstract: This chapter applies the framework of public goods to knowledge. It shows that knowledge has some characteristics of public good, such as being non‐rival in consumption and in the long run non‐excludable. But it also argues that knowledge cannot be transferred from producers to users at low or negligible costs: to effectively use knowledge, prospective users should devote time and energy to its assimilation. Consequently, free‐riding in knowledge is less likely to be successful than with other public goods. This has also important implications for national and global policies. Catching up countries need to implement policies of active learning if they really wish to get the benefit of knowledge. Intellectual property rights have the purpose of making knowledge institutionally excludable, and this contradicts the objective pursued by governments and international organizations to disseminate science and technology. It is finally argued that the normative implication of the global public goods analysis in the case of knowledge requires greater public investment and international cooperation.

Excludability: A laboratory study on forced ranking in team production

Abstract: Exclusion has long been employed as a common disciplinary measure against defectors, both at work and in social life. In this paper, we study the effect of excludability – exclusion of the lowest contributor – on contributions in three different team production settings. We demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that excludability increases contributions. Excludability is particularly effective in production settings where the average or maximum effort determines team production. In these settings, we observe almost immediate convergence to full contribution. In settings where the minimum effort determines team production, excludability leads to a large increase in contributions only if the value of the excluded individual's contribution to the public good is redistributed among the included individuals.

Ethnic Parties and Public Spending New Theory and Evidence From the Indian States

Abstract: Social scientists largely see ethnic politics as inhibiting public goods provisioning within developing democracies. Such parties are thought to uniformly rely on distributing excludable benefits t...

Incomplete Cooperation and Co-Benefits: Deepening Climate Cooperation with a Proliferation of Small Agreements

Abstract: Case study and model results lend some optimism for the potential of small coalitions with partially excludable public goods to substantially deepen international cooperation on energy and climate issues. Drawing motivation from other issue areas in international relations ranging from nuclear non-proliferation, transboundary air pollution and liberalized trade, we use an evolutionary-game-theoretic model to analyze regimes that yield domestic incentives to contribute to public goods provision (co-benefits). Co-benefits may be limited, but can create a nucleus for formation of coalitions that grow while deepening provision of global public goods. The Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) is a prime example of an agreement that employs partially excludable club benefits to deepen cooperation on non-CO2 greenhouse gases. Our game-theoretic results support two important insights for the building blocks approach to addressing climate change: sustained cooperation in club agreements is possible even when public goods are not entirely excludable and some members of the population free ride; and second, cooperation in small club configurations yields larger non-excludable public goods benefits than cooperation in more inclusive forums. This paper lends positive support that a proliferation of small agreements under a building blocks approach at the UNFCCC may be more effective (not just more likely) for deepening climate change cooperation than a fully inclusive approach.

The economics of television: excludability, rivalry, and imperfect competition

Abstract: 1 Media as multi-sided platforms 3 Jean J. Gabszewicz, Joana Resende and Nathalie Sonnac 2 Vertical ownership, technology and programming content 36 Sung Wook Ji and David Waterman 3 Economics of trade in media products 53 Steven S. Wildman and SangYup Lee 4 Media clusters and metropolitan knowledge economy 80 Charlie Karlsson and Philippe Rouchy 5 Economics of advertising: the role of commercial media 107 Anthony Dukes 6 The pricing of advertising 123 Agostino Manduchi

Public Production of Private and Public Goods in the CzechRepublic in 2013

Abstract: This publication is focused on the definition of the concept of a ‘public good’. It gives a classification of public goods according to the generally accepted definition by Samuelson and Nordhaus (2013) based on data on the production of public goods in the Czech Republic in 2013. However, the classification reveals that it is not possible to objectively incorporate the public goods produced in the Czech Republic in 2013 as public, club, merit or private. A five-degree scale ranging from the rivalry to non-rivalry of goods and from the excludability to non-excludability of goods has been chosen for the purpose of the research. Although this classification is also very subjective, it clearly reveals that the hitherto used definition of public good is not relevant. It does not enable either an objective classification or an international comparison.

A Tale of Two Mechanisms: Incentivizing Investments in Security Games

Abstract: In a system of interdependent users, the security of an entity is affected not only by that user’s investment in security measures, but also by the positive externality of the security decisions of (some of) the other users. The provision of security in such system is therefore modeled as a public good provision problem, and is referred to as a security game. In this paper, we compare two well-known incentive mechanisms in this context for incentivizing optimal security investments among users, namely the Pivotal and the Externality mechanisms. The taxes in a Pivotal mechanism are designed to ensure users’ voluntary participation, while those in an Externality mechanism are devised to maintain a balanced budget. We first show the more general result that, due to the nonexcludable nature of security, no mechanism can incentivize the socially optimal investment profile, while at the same time ensuring voluntary participation and maintaining a balanced budget for all instances of security games. To further illustrate, we apply the Pivotal and Externality mechanisms to the special case of weighted total effort interdependence models, and identify some of the effects of varying interdependency between users on the budget deficit in the Pivotal mechanism, as well as on the participation incentives in the Externality mech

Opportunity Cost Classification of Goods and Markets

Abstract: Sixty years ago, Samuelson’s “Pure Theory of Public Expenditure” expounded the classification of goods, and Bain’s “Economies of Scale, Concentration and the Condition of Entry in Twenty Manufacturing Industries” expounded the structure-conduct-performance paradigm. To the present day, rivalry in- and excludability from consumption classify goods, and subadditivity and irreversibility in production classify market structure. Opportunity costs of production in the form of prospective sunk costs incentivise investment and production, and the sunk costs themselves induce subadditivities, specialization and convexity of the marginal rate of technical substitution. Opportunity costs in consumption are determined by the marginal costs of replacement. In light of the recent Nobel price award to Jean Tirole, we revisit some of the forgotten discussions and clarify some of the terminology under a more economic framework of opportunity costs.