Organically grown crowdsourcing networks, which includes production firms and social network based crowdsourcing applications, tend to have a hierarchical structure. Considering the entire crowdsourcing system as a consolidated organization, a primary goal of a designer is to maximize the net productive output of this hierarchy using reward sharing as an incentive tool. Every individual in a hi...

Heterogeneity in Nash networks with two-way flow can arise due to differences in the following four variables: (i) the value of information held by agents, (ii) the rate at which information decays or loses its value as it traverses the network, (iii) the probability with which a link transmits information, and (iv) the cost of forming a link. In this paper we show that heterogeneity plays an i...

This paper examines the political economy of redistribution when voters have asymmetric information about the redistributive preferences of politicians and the latter cannot make credible policy commitments. The candidates in each party are endogenously selected by a process of Nash Bargaining between the competing factions. In equilibrium, there is “partial convergence” of redistributive polic...

This paper provides a proof of a condition for uniqueness of Cournot equilibrium. Existing proofs of the same condition have shown it to imply a unique element within a limited class of Cournot equilibria, but leave open the possibility of other purestrategy equilibria outside this class. A simpler approach permits us to derive the condition and to rule out the possibility of these other equili...

In 1994 the state of Michigan implemented one of the most comprehensive school finance reforms undertaken to date in any of the states. Understanding the effects of the reform is thus of value in informing other potential reform initiatives. In addition, the reform and associated changes in the economic environment provide an opportunity to assess whether a simple general equilibrium model can ...

Two standard schemes for awarding a prize have been examined in the literature. The prize is awarded (πD) deterministically: to the contestant with the highest output; (πP ) probabilistically: to all contestants, with probabilities proportional to their outputs. Our main result is that if there is suffi cient diversity in contestants’skills, and not too much noise on output, then πP will elicit...

This paper studies a social game where agents choose their partners as well as their actions. Players interact with direct and indirect neighbors in the endogenous network. We show that the architecture of any nontrivial Nash equilibrium is minimally connected, and equilibrium actions approximate a symmetric equilibrium of the underlying game. We apply the model to analyze stochastic stability ...

This paper reports an experimental study on three well-known solutions for problems of adjudicating con‡icting claims: the constrained equal-awards, the proportional, and the constrained equal-losses rules. We …rst let subjects play three games designed such that the unique equilibrium allocation coincides with the recommendation of one of these three rules. In addition, we let subjects play an...

This article applies a general equilibrium model to analyse the impact of new rice technology on household income and uses agricultural household survey data from China to test the implications of this model. It is shown that, when a new rice technology becomes available, the adopting household will reallocate resources to increase rice production and reduce the production of other goods. Meanw...

In this paper we make two contributions to the growing literature on \citizen-candidate" models of representative democracy. First, we add uncertainty about the total vote count. We show that in a society with a large electorate, where the outcome of the election is uncertain and where winning candidates receive a large reward from holding oÆce, there will be a two-candidate equilibrium and no ...