Joint use of resources with usage-dependent cost raises the question: who pays how much? We study cost sharing in resource selection games where the strategy spaces are either singletons or bases of a matroid defined on the ground set of resources. Our goal is to design cost sharing protocols so as to minimize the resulting price of anarchy and price of stability. We investigate three classes o...

We estimate Japanese banking inefficiency and the shadow price of problem loans by treating problem loans as a jointly produced undesirable by-product of the loan production process. Our method uses the directional output distance function of Färe et al. [R. Färe, S. Grosskopf, D.-W. Noh, W.L. Weber, Characteristics of a polluting technology: Theory and practice, Journal of Econometrics 126 (20...

New information and communication technology (ICT) makes consumers better informed about available products, product quality and prices, which mitigates problems of asymmetric information. The entry of firms is facilitated, competition and economic efficiency is boosted and the market powers of households increased. Firms are likely to respond by increased product and price differentiation. The...

In the absense of free trade, domestic productivity will be a major determinant of prices. I consider an empirical framework where an industry’s R&D determines its productivity. Using repeated cross-sections of absolute prices of individual goods across European countries, I find that products of an industry tend to be cheaper in countries with higher stocks of R&D in that industry. I proceed t...

Recent years have witnessed a rapid rise in the development of deterministic and nondeterministic models to estimate human impacts on the environment. An important failing of these models is the difficulty that most people have understanding the results generated by them, the implications to their way of life and also that of future generations. Within the field, the measurement of greenhouse g...

Prediction markets are increasingly being considered as methods for gathering, summarizing and aggregating diffuse information by governments and businesses alike. Critics worry that these markets are susceptible to price manipulation by agents who wish to distort decision making. We study the effect of manipulators on an experimental market, and find that manipulators are unable to distort pri...

Pioneers began using scalable computing systems over 10 years ago. Slowly the potential audience for scalable systems has grown as programming methods and systems have matured. The CRAY T3D system enabled production users to use scalable systems. Now, the CRAY T3E system is pushing beyond the CRAY T3D base by delivering the most advanced scalable technology at lower price points, and to users o...

In this paper we propose the application of the original, superlative price index formula for the measurement of commodity substitution bias associated with Consumer Price Index (CPI). In our simulation study we compare CPI bias values calculated by using the original price index formula with those calculated on the basis of some known, superlative price indices.

We use shifts in food Engel curves among the U.S. elderly to estimate the extent of Consumer Price Index (CPI) bias specific to this population. Over the last thirty years the share of total expenditure devoted to food has declined more rapidly for elderly-headed households than for other households. This decline is not explained by a more rapid increase in measured total expenditure for the el...

Resource allocation decisions are crucial for the success of an organization. This paper proposes an integrated approach to resource allocation problems, in which decision makers have one observation of the multiple input-output criteria of candidates. We offer important improvements over existing approaches based on the widely used data envelopment analysis (DEA), which has two major limitatio...