Allotment and subcontracting are the two procedures enabling small businesses to participate in procurement. We compare these two procedures in the context of a procurement contract awarded by a first-price sealed-bid auction. We assume that the public buyer wishes to fulfil two different goals: to minimize expected costs of the contract for the public buyer and to maximize small businesses' profit. We show that, under specific cost-technology conditions we determine, the allotment procedure not only enables extensive participation by small businesses but also can achieve the goal of minimizing expected total costs for the public buyer.

A general conclusion of the theoretical literature on pensions is, confronted to an increased longevity, to encourage continued activity. This literature however assumes a perfect labour market. The central question addressed in this article is whether it is still desirable to increase the retirement age when individuals face the risk of being unemployed.

In this purpose, we study the design of the P ay-As-You-Go pension system, focusing on the determination of the retirement age, in a model where people differ according to age only and face in every period a given probability of becoming unemployed.

We first determine the optimal pension system, which consists in a payroll tax rate, a pension benefit level and a retirement age and study its comparative statics with respect to a change of the unemployment rate and the length of life. Our main findings are the following. First, it is optimal to postpone retirement when life expectancy increases. Second, when unemployment benefits are low the optimal retirement age may decrease with the unemployment rate.

We then characterize the issue-by-issue voting equilibrium and compare it to the optimal pension scheme. It is shown that the median voter in general chooses a retirement age lower than the optimal one as well as a higher payroll tax rate.

Neuroeconomics is not in 2012 a unified field, after a decade of identifiable existence. It is not clear whether it should be defined as the “old” field of neurosciences of decision-making, as part of the most recent social neurosciences, or as something else, more loosely tapping jointly into experimental economics, decision-theory and cognitive and affective neuroscience. Its boundaries then are vague, multi-layered, and it will be relatively arbitrary to restrict it to coherent confines as we will try to do. Moreover, the problem that affects the definition of neuroeconomics is not only one of extension, but one of characterizing its purposes. Is its more relevant import modeling, new facts-finding, epistemological revolution or restoration inside economics?

In economics, three nested organizational levels, namely behavioural, mental and neural, can be distinguished. They introduce specific theoretical or observable concepts and suggest their own models for choice making. If psycho-economics relates implemented actions to declared mental states, neuro-economics relates mental states to brain areas. Bridge principles can be defined which link concepts with similar interpretations at two successive levels. Thanks to these principles, relations or even models independently suggested at two successive levels may well be associated. Some prescriptive applications of these principles were more recently proposed, but they remain grounded on a too fragile basis.

This paper analyzes optimal nonlinear pricing for a monopoly supplying a bundle of a commodity and a related service, where the consumers' private information is captured by scalar variable. With constant marginal costs, we find the standard result where the good and the service in the bundle are lower than separately. However, under the increasing cost assumption, when the degree of the complementarity becomes sufficiently high, the marginal price of separate good is lower than the good price in the bundle. Contrary to Martimort (1992), when good and service are perfectly complementary, we can not conclude that it is costly for consumers to sign two contracts from different shops than to buy the bundle. Because of asymmetric properties in the utility function, profitability result of bundling strategy depends, on the one hand, on the degree of complementarity between commodity and related service and on the other hand, on the degree of the optional service.

Ce papier examine l'externalité verticale provenant de l'imposition d'une même base par des gouvernements aux territoires gigognes, phénomène récurrent observé dans la plupart des organiations étatiques et ayant fait l'objet d'un éclairage moins soutenu que celui de concurrence fiscale horizontale. Le modèle étudie un système comportant plusieurs niveaux de dèci-deurs et utilise la théorie des multiprincipaux pour analyser l'optimalité du degré de taxe lorsque plusieurs autorités exercent leur pouvoir fiscal sur une même assiette imposable. Cette théorie permet en effet d'appréhender et de décrire les mécanismes de concurrence entre différents décideurs poursuivant des objectifs propres. Il ressort que le comportement non coopératif de collectivités appartenant à différents niveaux administratifs et partageant une même base fiscale conduit à une hausse du taux de taxation auquel cette base est soumise. Chacun néglige en effet la perte de recettes fiscales qu'il inflige aux autres niveaux de gouvernement etdéfinit donc une taxe supérieure à celle qui correspondrait au coût marginal social. Le taux final d'imposition excède celui qui résulterait de l'exercice par un seul décideur public de la politique fiscale à mettre en oeuvre. Il apparaît en outre que la prise en compte d'une asymétrie d'information exerce un effet dépressif sur le niveau global d'imposition en conauisant chaque échelon à accorder une rente aux firmes, et donc à modérer sa pression fiscale, afin qu'elles révèlent leur information privéeet que puissent être mises en oeuvre les politiques les plus proches d'un optimum social.

The model of memory process we propose is based on two assumptions. First, spatial or adresses network models in economics can be easily adapted to describe a significative part of the episodic memory mechanism as defined by Tulving (1983). Second, brain viewed as a network behaves as a decision-maker who arbitrates between two economic dimensions of recollection: the reward—i.e., the satisfaction for recovering old informations located in mnesic traces—and the cost—i.e., the price for stimulating the traces network. Indeed, the two results exhibited in the paper—and devoted to a formal and appealing characterization of true and false recollections—are directly derived from the idea of a rational brain. Finally, this paper aims at showing that it could be relevant to model memory processes in a pure symbolic way—contrary to most of the neuroeconomics contributions which are generally experimental—and also that such an attempt for an abstract and analogical representation of the episodic memory process based on a spatial microeconomics methodology seems to be specially efficient and illustrative of Hintzman (1986) and recent Doeller et al. (2010) intuitions and features.

Cet article développe un modèle intégrant le role de la monnaie et des flux de capitaux internationaux afin d'examiner la fragilité du système bancaire d'une petite économie ouverte dans un contexte de crise financière internationale. Le modèle met l'accent sur les décalages de maturité et de devises au niveau du bilan des banques et illustre comment la contraction du crédit sur le marché financier international, via les banques commerciales, impacte la monnaie et l'activité d'une petite économie. Les effets stabilisants du capital bancaire et du ratio minimal de capital sur le système bancaire sont également examinés. Par ailleurs, le modèle souligne qu'un secteur informel de dimension importante est un facteur défavorable àla stabilisation de la valeur de la monnaie et du système financier.

In contingent valuation surveys, there is a range of possible explanations for zero bids, from true zero responses consistent with economic decisions to protest responses. According to the empirical literature, which analyzes the determinants of willingness-to-pay (WTP) values from a bidding process, the double-hurdle is the most appropriate econometric approach to account for zero and protest WTP. However, when the number of protest responses is too small to be explicitly modelled, this approach is not applicable. This frequently occurs in critical health care situations, where large samples are not easily available. We discuss the possible econometric strategies for use in such cases. For illustrative purposes, the different models were applied to an empirical situation, which refers to the location preference (i.e. home versus hospital) from French cancer patients for blood transfusion. Our results show that protest responses should not be discarded, even if present in small numbers, and that the type II Tobit and the standard truncated regression model could both be applied. However, since from small finite samples, the most robust estimation is obtained from the bootstrap method with a high number of replications, the truncated regression model, easily applicable, weakly computer time-consuming and not subject to identification problems in this case contrary to the type II Tobit, should be the econometric strategy of choice for various WTP studies in the healthcare field.

D'après la théorie quantitative de la monnaie, une expansion de la masse monétaire devrait avoir pour effets à la fois une baisse des taux d'intérêt et une augmentation du prix des biens et services. La corrélation négative attendue entre ces deux dernières variables étant contredite par la corrélation positive observée initialement par Gibson - et confirmée par les travaux ultérieurs - Keynes évoque le « paradoxe de Gibson ». I. Fisher a proposé une explication de ce « paradoxe » fondée sur la lenteur des ajustements des taux d'intérêt au taux d'inflation. Cependant, F.R.Macaulay a montré que, lorsque l'influence de l'inflation sur les taux d'intérêt remonte loin dans le passé, il existe une relation nécessaire entre le niveau des prix et la moyenne pondérée des taux d'inflation passés calculée par Fisher. Dès lors, on peut se demander si la corrélation positive entre le niveau des prix et le taux d'intérêt est le résultat d'un comportement fishérien des agents, ou au contraire, si les résultats de Fisher ne sont qu'une conséquence triviale de la corrélation constatée entre le niveau des prix et le taux d'intérêt. Toute¬fois, la critique de Macaulay perd sa pertinence lorsque les ajustements sont rapides (i.e. la mémoire du passé est courte), comme pendant les hyperin¬flations ou encore la période d'après la seconde guerre mondiale. Par rap¬port à ce débat, le mérite de la théorie Héréditaire et Relativiste (HR) d'Allais est de tenter une réconciliation, avec l'hypothèse du « taux d'inté¬rêt psychologique » i. Dépendant des variations passées des prix et de la production, ce taux s'égalise au « taux d'oubli » et représente la tendance générale des taux d'intérêt du marché. Lorsque la mémoire est longue (i.e. taux d'oubli faible), le taux i est nécessairement lié au niveau des prix, et rend donc compte de la corrélation positive - pouvant être plus ou moins stable en raison de l'influence de la production - entre le taux d'intérêt du marché et le niveau des prix. Cependant, lorsque la mémoire est courte (i.e. taux d'oubli élevé), la théorie HR implique à la fois la disparition de la corrélation entre le taux d'intérêt et le niveau des prix et l'émergence d'une corrélation positive entre le taux d'intérêt et le taux de variation courant des prix, comme cela est aussi souvent observé.

Cet article évalue les effets d'une politique des dividendes endogène dans le cadre d'un modèle cambridgien de croissance et répartition. Dans cette optique, nous prenons en compte les interactions entre le taux de rétention et le niveau d'endettement et mettons en évidence les conditions de la stabilité macroéconomique. Ainsi, nous montrons que l'instabilité financière provient de comportements moins prudents de la part des gestionnaires, concernant le versement des dividendes. Enfin, quelques simulations numériques servent à illustrer les résultats précédents.

The past decade has witnessed an unprecedented growth in our understanding of the brain basis of economic decision-making. In particular, research is uncovering not only the location of brain regions where certain processes are taking place, but also the nature of the (economically meaningful) latent variables that are represented, as well as how they relate to behavior. This transition from understanding where to how economic decisions are being made in the brain has been integral to relating neural processes to economic models of behavior. This progress, however, has been notably uneven. Neu-roeconomic studies of individual decision-making, such as those involve risk and time preferences, have the benefit of drawing on decades of work from neuroscientific studies of animal behavior. Critically, many of these findings are based on quantitative, computational approach that lends well to economic experimentation. In contrast, our understanding of the neural systems underlying social behavior is much less specific. A large measure of the current challenge in fact arises from the empirical shortcomings of standard game theoretic predictions of behavior, which are largely equilibrium-based. Using our own study as an example, we show how one can directly search for the latent variables implied by current economic models of strategic learning, and attempt to localize them in the brain. Specifically, we show that the neural systems underlying strategic learning build directly on top of those involved in simple trial-and-error learning, but incorporate additional computations that capture belief-based learning. Finally, we discuss how our approach can be extended to address fundamental problems in economics.

Solving the exploration/exploitation trade-off is a fundamental issue for an organism living in an uncertain and changing environment. This review describes how a stream of cognitive neuroscience studies linked exploratory behaviour to structures in the human prefrontal cortex, then identified the brain mechanisms involved in the online adaptation of behaviour relatively to reward changes, and finally revealed fundamental limitations in the processing of information at the prefrontal level. The experiments and the results we present could particularly be of interest to economists who want to understand how cognitive neuroscience identify key processes in the human brain and shapes our understanding of decision-making.

Recent developments of neuroimaging technology enable us to investigate the brain network implicated in economical decision making (Glimcher et al. 2004; Camerer 2008). One of the fascinating topic is “ambiguity aversion” where people tend to avoid unknown options as demonstrated by Ellsberg paradox. Although “ambiguity aversion” has been consistently observed in a variety of situations, uncertainty due to incomplete knowledge can be resolved by obtaining missing information, and people explore the ambiguous options as well.

Here, we review a number of neuroimaging studies on “ambiguity aversion” and associated works. It has been shown that the affective OFC and the cognitive prefrontal cortex play a crucial role in decision making under uncertainty. We discuss what kinds of cognitive function are involved in the decision making process by overviewing neuroimaing studies on higher cognitive processes in general including exploratory behavior.