Suchergebnisse

A comment on J. A. Amegashie's "The Number of Rent-Seekers and Aggregate Rent-Seeking Expenditures: An Unpleasant Result" (1999). Questions are raised regarding the amount of rent-seeking that actually takes place in the proposed model, how it varies with number of participants, & the practicality of the reward structure.

In the first volume of Capital, Marx argued that the labor theory of value could only be discovered in capitalist societies. Building on Marx's premise, this article examines Ibn Khaldun's (1377) The Muqaddimah, which presents one of the first labor theories of value in world history. After explaining different elements of Ibn Khaldun's labor theory of value, the article revisits what Giovanni Arrighi referred to as the "nondebates of the 1970s" and proposes that North Africa was already incorporated into an Italian centered capitalist world-economy in the fourteenth century. Since a key element of Marx's argument was the impossibility of the emergence of abstract labor in societies (e.g. ancient Greece) which do not have the idea of equality of human beings and human labor, in the latter part, the article analyzes Ibn Khaldun's theory of race and human equality. We show that Ibn Khaldun, through his comparative and historical observations, acknowledged the equality of all humans and the constructed nature of race, influenced by geography, history, and political economy. The world-historical analysis and theoretical interventions of the article helps us rethink capitalism and racism as two major pillars of modernity.

We introduce learning by doing in a dynamic contest. Contestants compete in an early round and can use the experience gained to reduce effort cost in a subsequent contest. A contest designer can decide how much of the prize mass to distribute in the early contest and how much to leave for the later one in order to maximize total efforts. We show how this division affects effort at each stage, and present conditions that characterize the optimal split. There is a trade off here, since a large early prize increases first period efforts leading to a substantial reduction in second round effort cost; on the other hand, there is less of the prize mass to fight over in the second round, reducing effort at that stage. The results are indicative of the fact that the designer often prefers to leave most of the prize mass for the second contest to reap the gains from the learning by doing effect. Adapted from the source document.

We consider a game in which three committee members must divide up a benefit among themselves. In response to the large literature on sequential procedures in this type of game, we propose an institution that is inspired by auction theory. The (sealed) bids of the players are proposals for a distribution of the benefit and are given simultaneously. If any of the bids is preferred to all others in a pairwise comparison (i.e., a Condorcet winner exists) then this proposal is implemented. If such a bid does not exist then an equal split of the benefit is assumed. An equilibrium of this game is for each player to suggest that one of the opponents should receive the lion's share of the benefit, even though each player cares only about his own share. We call this phenomenon 'rational benevolence'. Although the end that is desired by the players is purely egoistic, the means of achieving it may be perceived as benevolent. Several applications of the game are suggested. Adapted from the source document.