Rationality and Society Workshop 2014

June 16, 2014 (Monday) 10:30-12:10

※CIRJE特別セミナーと共催

東京大学大学院経済学研究科 学術交流棟 （小島ホール）１階 第１セミナー室
Seminar Room 1 on the 1st floor of the Economics Research Annex (Kojima Hall) [Map]

Alisha Holland   (Harvard University, Society of Fellows)

Redistributive Politics in Truncated Welfare States [PDF]

     The relationship between income and support for redistribution is weak and variable in many developing countries, despite high levels of economic inequality. I argue that public opinion reflects the degree to which tax and transfer policies genuinely redistribute resources to the poor. It is not in the material interests of the poor to support "truncated" social policies that tie benefits to formal sector employment. I formalize the logic and use public opinion data from Latin America and Europe to show that popular support is dampened and unmoored from income in policy areas and countries where the poor gain less from social expenditures. In contrast to weakly progressive government welfare provision, more economically progressive forms of informal redistribution like land takings polarize preferences in Latin America. Attention to the structure of redistribution sheds light on political coalition formation outside of Europe and unifies literatures on social policy in developing and advanced economies.

Profile of Alisha Holland by Pacific Standard magazine:

The 30 Top Thinkers Under 30: The Student of Latin American Politics Who Wants to Understand Inaction

Alisha's homepage

June 16, 2014 (Monday) 14:50-16:30

※CIRJE特別セミナーと共催

東京大学大学院経済学研究科 学術交流棟 （小島ホール）１階 第１セミナー室
Seminar Room 1 on the 1st floor of the Economics Research Annex (Kojima Hall) [Map]

Glen Weyl   (University of Chicago, Department of Economics)

Quadratic Voting  (joint with Steven P. Lalley) [PDF]

      While democracy often leads to the tyranny of the majority, alternatives that have been proposed by economists suffer even more severe problems related to multiple inefficient equilibria and budgets. A simple mechanism, Quadratic Voting (QV), addresses all of these concerns, offering a practical efficient alternative to one-man-one-vote. Voters making a binary decision purchase votes from a centralized clearing house paying the square of the number of votes purchased. Funds raised are refunded to participants in an essentially arbitrary manner. If individuals take the chance of a marginal vote being pivotal as given, as market participants take prices as given, QV is the unique pricing scheme that is efficient for all valuation arrangements. We make detailed conjectures about the rates and constants of convergence of any Bayesian equilibrium in an independent private values environment towards this efficient limiting outcome and provide extensive analytic and computational support for these results but have as of yet been unable to prove these from first principles. We provide similar conjectural analysis of the mechanism in a range of other environments that reassure us of the robustness of QV, in contrast to existing mechanisms. I am pursuing a range of applications through my collaboration with law professor Eric Posner, especially in the context of the start-up venture Collective Decision Engines that we have founded to commercialize the mechanism for internal decision-making in firms and market research surveys.

Profile of Glen Weyl by Pacific Standard magazine:

The 30 Top Thinkers Under 30: The Quadratic Voting Inventor Who Wants to Refit the Social Machine

Glen's University of Chicago homepage

August 25, 2014 (Monday) 16:40-18:20

※ミクロ経済学ワークショップと共催

東京大学大学院経済学研究科 学術交流棟 （小島ホール）2階　小島コンファレンスルーム
in Koijma Conference Room on the 2nd floor of the Economics Research Annex (Kojima Hall) [Map]

小島武仁 (Fuhito Kojima) (Stanford University)

Stable Matching in Large Economies (joint with Yeon-Koo Che and Jinwoo Kim)

   Complementarities of preferences have been known to jeopardize the stability of two-sided matching markets, yet they are a pervasive feature of many matching markets. We revisit the stability issue with such preferences in a large market. Workers have preferences over firms while firms have preferences over distributions of workers and may exhibit complementarity. We demonstrate that if each firm's choice changes continuously as the set of available workers changes, then there exists a stable matching even with complementarity. Building on this result, we show that there exists an approximately stable matching in any large finite economy. We apply our analysis to show the existence of stable matchings in probabilistic and time-share matching models with a finite number of firms and workers.

Fuhito's homepage

October 6, 2014 (Monday)16:40-18:10

※CIRJE特別セミナー、ミクロ実証分析ワークショップ、経済史研究会、財政・公共経済ワークショップ、ミクロ経済学ワークショップ、工学系研究科技術経営戦略学専攻、応用統計ワークショップと共催

東京大学大学院経済学研究科 学術交流棟 （小島ホール）2階　小島コンファレンスルーム
in Koijma Conference Room on the 2nd floor of the Economics Research Annex (Kojima Hall) [Map]

James J. Heckman (University of Chicago)

The Market and Nonmarket Returns to Education

February 24, 2015 (Tuesday) 14:00-15:10

※Tokyo Workshop on International Developmentと共催

東京大学大学院経済学研究科 学術交流棟 （小島ホール） 1階 第2セミナー室
in Seminar Room 2 on the 1st floor of the Economics Research Annex (Kojima Hall) [Map]

Nazmul Chaudhury (World Bank)

Decentralization and Service Delivery: Lessons learnt from the World Bank experience