Budget Constraints Affect Male Rats’ Choices between Differently Priced Commodities

Budget Constraints Affect Male Rats’ Choices between Differently Priced Commodities

Demand theory can be applied to analyse how a human or animal consumer changes her selection of commodities within a certain budget in response to changes in price of those commodities. This change in consumption assessed over a range of prices is defined as demand elasticity. Previously, income-compensated and income-uncompensated price changes have been investigated using human and animal con...

Dextromethorphan affects ventilation differently in male and female rats.

Subcutaneous administration of aspartic acid results in a long-lasting but reversible depression of ventilation in male but not in female rats. Aspartic acid acts on N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors. The present study tested the hypothesis that a noncompetitive N-methyl-D-aspartate-receptor antagonist, dextromethorphan (Dex), would depress ventilation in female rats and stimulate it in male rats....

Auctions with Budget Constraints

In a combinatorial auction k different items are sold to n bidders, where the objective of the seller is to maximize the revenue. The main difficulty to find an optimal allocation is due to the fact that the valuation function of each bidder for bundles of items is not necessarily an additive function over the items. An auction with budget constraints is a common special case where bidders gene...

Defense Choices and Resource Constraints: The Dilemma of the Investment-Driven Defense Budget

Size and soft budget constraints

There is much evidence against the so-called ”too big to fail” hypothesis in the case of bailouts to sub-national governments. We look at a model where districts of different size provide local public goods with positive spillovers. Matching grants of a central government can induce socially-efficient provision, but districts can still exploit the intervening central government by inducing dire...