The current tax system is counterproductive and biased against saving and investment. The tax system imposes large losses on the economy that reduce the economic welfare of households and businesses. The current level of taxation imposes additional costs of about 40 cents at the margin for each dollar collected in revenue. A reduction in the burden imposed by the tax system would make a signifi...

We develop optimal VCG mechanisms in order to assign identical economic “bads” (for example, costly tasks) to agents. The optimal non-deficit VCG mechanism achieves asymptotic budget balance, yet the non-deficit requirement is incompatible with reasonable welfare bounds. If we omit the non-deficit requirement, individual rationality greatly changes the relationship between burning a budget surp...

Recently published and estimated historical data illustrate that economic surplus declined during the thirteenth fourteenth centuries in England, helping explain "crisis of feudalism" started century. It was not until several later, when capitalism became dominant system, began to rise on a consistent basis, due reinvestment portion into productive activities, greater ratio capital income renta...

Wildland fire is an important disturbance agent in the western US and globally. However, the natural role of fire has been disrupted in many regions due to the influence of human activities, which have the potential to either exclude or promote fire, resulting in a ‘‘fire deficit’’ or ‘‘fire surplus’’, respectively. In this study, we developed a model of expected area burned for the western US ...

This paper considers the question of tacit collusion in repeated auctions with independent private values and with limited public monitoring. McAfee and McMillan show that the extent of collusion is tied to availability of transfers. Monetary transfers allow cartels to extract full surplus. A folk theorem proved by Fudenberg at al. shows that transfers of future payoffs are almost as good if pl...

Online reputation mechanisms are emerging as a promising alternative to more established mechanisms for promoting trust and cooperative behavior, such as legally enforceable contracts. As information technology dramatically reduces the cost of accumulating, processing and disseminating consumer feedback, it is plausible to ask whether such mechanisms can provide an economically more efficient s...

The phenomenon of the shortage of rural workers is a response of labor market to rapid export growth and economic growth after China became a WTO member. It not only indicates a transition of China’s rural surplus labor forces from unlimited supply to limited surplus, but also highlights the urgent need for an integrated national labor market to solve the structural issue of segregated local la...