			Home About us Contact

Private Goods (private + goods)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	57%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	42%

Selected Abstracts

VOTING, INEQUALITY AND REDISTRIBUTION

JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS, Issue 1 2007
Rainald Borck
Abstract This paper surveys models of voting on redistribution. Under reasonable assumptions, the baseline model produces an equilibrium with the extent of redistributive taxation chosen by the median income earner. If the median is poorer than average, redistribution is from rich to poor, and increasing inequality increases redistribution. However, under different assumptions about the economic environment, redistribution may not be simply rich to poor, and inequality need not increase redistribution. Several lines of argument are presented, in particular, political participation, public provision of private goods, public pensions, and tax avoidance or evasion. [source]

Deferred Harvests: The Transition from Hunting to Animal Husbandry

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2001
Michael S. Alvard
We define animal husbandry as prey conservation. Conservation is rare among extant hunters and only likely to occur when prey are highly valued, private goods. The long-term discounted deferred returns from husbandry must also be greater than the short-term returns from hunting. We compare the returns from hunting and husbanding strategies as a function of prey body size. Returns from husbanding are estimated using a maximum sustainable yield (MSY) model. Following Charnov (1993), allometric analyses show that the MSY is nearly independent of prey body size. The opportunity costs of husbanding are measured as prey standing biomass times the discount rate. Since standing biomass scales positively with body size, the opportunity costs of husbanding are greater for larger animals. An evolutionary discount rate is estimated following Rogers (1994) to be between 2.4% and 6%. Using these values, the prey body size for which hunting and meat-only husbanding provide the same return is approximately 40kg. Animals greater than 40kg are predicted to be hunted, [animal husbandry, evolutionary ecology, allometry, hunting, Neolithic transition] [source]

The Violent and the Weak

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 4 2006
When Dictators Care about Social Contracts
This article explores conditions under which dictators comply with a social contract. We assume society to consist of two groups: one with a comparative advantage in using violence, the other with a comparative advantage in producing private goods. Violence can be used to produce security or to exploit the weaker group. The opportunity for exploitation is limited: it reduces the incentives of the exploited to produce private goods and increases the chances of revolution. Social contracts consist of the exchange of security against a share of the private good, produced at a high effort level. The model allows the derivation of conditions for either compliance or exploitation to occur and provides a comparative static explanation for the transition from one form of government to the other. Thus, it contributes to positive constitutional economics, the research program that is interested in explaining the emergence and change of constitutions. [source]

The Three Exit, Three Voice and Loyalty Framework: A Test with Survey Data on Local Services

POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2008
Keith Dowding
The article presents a modified Hirschman framework with three types of exit: moving location; moving from the public to a private sector provider; and moving between public sector providers; and three types of voice: private voice (complaining about private goods); voting; and collective action. Seven hypotheses are generated from this framework. The article then presents evidence from the first round of an online survey examining citizen satisfaction with public services and the relationship between exit and voice opportunities. We find dissatisfied people are more likely to complain privately, vote and engage in other forms of collective participation; but only a weak relationship exists between dissatisfaction and geographical exit. We find some evidence that the exit,voice trade-off might exist as more alert consumers are more likely to move from the public to the private sector and those ,locked in' are more likely to complain than those who have outside options. Overall the results tend to corroborate the hypotheses drawn from the modified Hirschman framework. [source]

When consensus choice dominates individualism: Jensen's inequality and collective decisions under uncertainty

QUANTITATIVE ECONOMICS, Issue 1 2010
Charles F. Manski
D7; D81; H42 Research on collective provision of private goods has focused on distributional considerations. This paper studies a class of problems of decision under uncertainty in which an efficiency argument for collective choice emerges from the mathematics of aggregating individual payoffs. Consider decision making when each member of a population has the same objective function, which depends on an unknown state of nature. If agents knew the state of nature, they would make the same decision. However, they may have different beliefs or may use different decision criteria to cope with their incomplete knowledge. Hence, they may choose different actions even though they share the same objective. Let the set of feasible actions be convex and the objective function be concave in actions, for all states of nature. Then Jensen's inequality implies that consensus choice of the mean privately chosen action yields a larger mean payoff than does individualistic decision making, in all states of nature. If payoffs are transferable, the mean payoff from consensus choice may be allocated to Pareto dominate individualistic decision making. I develop these ideas. I also use Jensen's inequality to show that a planner with the power to assign actions to the members of the population should not diversify. Finally, I give a version of the collective-choice result that holds with consensus choice of the median rather than mean action. [source]

Monopolistic Competition, Growth and Public Good Provision,

THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL, Issue 534 2009
Paul Pecorino
In the standard model, provision of a pure public good is increasing in group size if it is a normal good. I develop a model of public good provision in which private goods are supplied in a monopolistically competitive market. In this model, group size corresponds to population. I find that increases in population lead to reduced public good provision. The reason is quite simple: as population increases, the number of private goods available for consumption also increases. This raises the marginal utility of income and increases the opportunity cost of contributing to the public good. [source]

Nonlinear Pricing in General Equilibrium Models with Joint Production

THE JAPANESE ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 1 2001
Kazuya Kamiya
This paper considers general equilibrium models of public utilities which produce either public goods or private goods. In the models, cases of increasing returns are not a priori excluded. The products of the public utilities and their costs are allocated to the consumers according to a rule that is dependent on information communicated to the public utilities. We show that if the public utilities follow a nonlinear pricing rule, the equilibrium allocations are always Pareto-optimal. Moreover, the message space is of finite dimensions. JEL Classification Numbers: D51, D60, H41, H42. [source]