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on Collective Decision-Making |
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Issue of 2012‒11‒24
six papers chosen by |
| By: | Kummer, Michael E.; Saam, Marianne; Halatchliyski, Iassen; Giorgidze, George |
| Abstract: | When contributing content on large online platforms, producers of user-generated content have to decide where to contribute. On a complex and dynamic platform like Wikipedia, this decision is expected to depend on the way the content is organized. We analyse whether the hyperlinks on Wikipedia channel the attention of producers towards more central articles. We observe a sample 7,635 articles belonging to the category 'EconomicsI on German Wikipedia over 153 weeks and measure their centrality both within this category and in the network of over one million German Wikipedia articles. Our analysis reveals that an additional link from the observed category is associated with around 140 bytes of additional content and with an increase in the number of authors by nearly 0.5. Moreover we observe that the rate of content generation increases notably when previously unlinked articles get connected to the main cluster in the category. -- |
| Keywords: | Wikipedia,network position,user-generated content,hyperlinks |
| JEL: | L14 D83 |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:12053&r=cdm |
| By: | Andrea Vindigni (IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies); Cristina Tealdi (IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies) |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the social preferences over labor market flexibility, in a general equilibrium model of dynamic labor demand where the productivity of active firms evolves as a Geometric Brownian motion. A key result demonstrated is that how the economy responds to shocks, i.e. unexpected changes in the drift and standard deviation of the stochastic process describing the dynamics of productivity, depends on the power of labor to extract rents and on the status quo level of firing costs. In particular, we show that when firing costs are initially relatively low, a transition to a rigid labor market is favored by all and only the employed workers with idiosyncratic productivity below some threshold value. A more volatile environment, and a lower rate of productivity growth, i.e. "bad times," increase the political support for more labor market rigidity only where labor appropriates of relatively large rents. Moreover, we demonstrate that when the status quo level of firing costs is relatively high, the preservation of a rigid labor market is favored by the employed with intermediate productivity, whereas all other workers favor more flexibility. The coming of better economic conditions need not favor the demise of high firing costs in rigid high-rents economies, because "good times" cut down the support for flexibility among the least productive employed workers. The model described provides some new insights on the comparative dynamics of labor market institutions in the U.S. and in Europe over the last few decades, shedding some new light both on the reasons for the original build-up of "Eurosclerosis," and for its relative persistence until the present day. |
| Keywords: | employment protection, job creation and destruction, ?ring costs, idiosyncratic productivity, volatility, growth, political economy, voting, rents, status quo, path depen- dency, institutional divergence. |
| JEL: | D71 D72 E24 J41 J63 J65 |
| Date: | 2012–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ial:wpaper:6&r=cdm |
| By: | Ramón Jesús Flores Díaz; Elisenda Molina; Juan Tejada |
| Abstract: | We propose a new type of values for cooperative TU-games, which we call pyramidal values. Assuming that the grand coalition is sequentially formed, and all orderings are equally likely, we define a pyramidal value to be any expected payoff in which the entrant player receives a salary and the right to get part of the benefits derived from subsequent incorporations to the just formed coalition, whereas the remaining benefit is distributed among the incumbent players. To be specific, we consider some parametric families of pyramidal values: the egalitarian pyramidal family, which coincides with the a-consensus value family introduced by Ju et al. in (2007), the proportional pyramidal family, and the weighted pyramidal family, which in turn includes the other two families as special cases. We also analyze the properties of these families, as well as their relationships with other previously defined values. |
| Keywords: | Game theory, TU games, Pyramidal values, Consensus values |
| Date: | 2012–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cte:wsrepe:ws122418&r=cdm |
| By: | Uetake, Tetsuya |
| Abstract: | Agriculture is a provider of food and, to a certain extent, public goods such as biodiversity and landscape, but it can also have negative impacts on natural assets such as biodiversity and water quality. In addition to implementing policies that target individual farmers, different approaches are needed to promote collective action. The literature review and three New Zealand case studies (Sustainable Farming Fund, East Coast Forestry Project and North Otago Irrigation Company) have identified some findings including benefits and barriers of collective action and key factors for its success. Collective action should be given serious consideration in addressing agri-environmental problems. |
| Keywords: | Collective action, public goods, agri-environmental policy, social capital, Agribusiness, Environmental Economics and Policy, Public Economics, |
| Date: | 2012–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:nzar12:136071&r=cdm |
| By: | Ulrich Faigle (Zentrum für Angewandte Informatik Köln - Universität zu Köln); Michel Grabisch (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - CNRS : UMR8174 - Université Paris I - Panthéon Sorbonne, EEP-PSE - Ecole d'Économie de Paris - Paris School of Economics - Ecole d'Économie de Paris) |
| Abstract: | Time series of coalitions (so-called scenarios) are studied that describe processes of coalition formation where several players may enter or leave the current coalition at any point in (discrete) time and convergence to the grand coalition is not necessarily prescribed. Transitions from one coalition to the next are assumed to be random and to yield a Markov chain. Three examples of such processes (the Shapley-Weber process, the Metropolis process, and an example of a voting situation) and their properties are presented. A main contribution includes notions of value for such series, \emph{i.e.}, schemes for the evaluation of the expected contribution of a player to the coalition process relative to a given cooperative game. Particular processes permit to recover the classical Shapley value. This methodology's power is illustrated with well-known examples from exchange economies due to Shafer (1980) and Scafuri and Yannelis (1984), where the classical Shapley value leads to counterintuitive allocations. The Markovian process value avoids these drawbacks and provides plausible results. |
| Keywords: | coalitional game; coalition formation process; exchange economy; Markov chain; Shapley value |
| Date: | 2012 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-00749950&r=cdm |
| By: | Jayant V. Ganguli; Aviad Heifetz |
| Abstract: | We prove that a universal preference type space exists under much more general conditions than those postulated by Epstein and Wang (1996). To wit, it is enough that preferences can be encoded by a countable collection of continuous functionals, while the preferences themselves need not necessarily be continuous or regular, like, e.g., in the case of lexicographic preferences. The proof relies on a far-reaching generalization of a method developed by Heifetz and Samet (1998). |
| Date: | 2012–11–13 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:esx:essedp:722&r=cdm |