Essays on political economy and matching markets

Autor/a

Domènech i Gironell, Gerard

Director/a

Núñez, Marina (Núñez Oliva)

Tejada, Oriol

Tutor/a

Núñez, Marina (Núñez Oliva)

Fecha de defensa

2023-11-22

Páginas

117 p.



Departamento/Instituto

Universitat de Barcelona. Facultat d'Economia i Empresa

Resumen

[eng] In the thesis I make use of the tools provided by game theory to study the incentives of members of a variety of institutions. The three works that make up for the core of the dissertation, stress the importance of assessing properly how certain institutional rules might affect the behavior of the agents regulated by the said rules. The relevance of rules on incentives in order to assess institution performance was particularly highlighted by the Nobel laureate Douglass North. In the first main chapter of the thesis I study stable rules in the context of a job market in which workers and firms must be matched with each other, and both firms and workers might collaborate with more than one partner. Such a market is known in the literature as a multiple-partners job market. In this setting, by means of a novel axiomatization of certain stable rules of relevance, the firms-optimal stable rules and the workers-optimal stable rules, it is possible to address new comments regarding how some agents can manipulate the market. In particular, we show that in the firms-optimal stable rules, firms can manipulate the market, which was already known, but not by constantly over-reporting their productivity with the workers. In the second central chapter, I focus on the decision of a Parliament that must decide via voting whether or not to make a reform pass. All members of the Parliament agree that the reform is desirable, but there is an outside interest group that is willing to bribe them in order to make the reform fail the voting. The literature shows that the budget that the interest group might need in order to be sure to block the reform is potentially huge. However, by considering mixed-strategy equilibria, hence focusing on scenarios in which the interest group is not sure about the outcome of the election, I show that a small budget can be very disruptive. In particular, I prove that if the interest group offers an equal part of the budget to each member that votes against the reform, there are two symmetric completely mixed strategy Nash equilibria, and in both of them the reform is blocked with positive probability. Properties about these equilibria are derived in the chapter, such as the effect of enlarging the Parliament. In the last of the main chapters, I study the role of communication networks in information acquisition ahead of an election. An electorate has to guess which state of the world is taking place and its members can individually acquire (costly) information. I focus on determining how the existence of a network that allows electors to share information might affect their behavior. First of all, I prove that, if there is such a network, there is always an equilibrium such that only one elector acquires information. This kind of equilibrium does not exist in the no network case given that acquiring “few” information is cheap enough. Furthermore, I show that if acquiring information is expensive enough, then, both the case with network and the case without, have only a symmetric equilibrium and they coincide. Hence, in the latter case, the introduction of the network has no effect on welfare.

Palabras clave

Teoria de jocs; Teoría de los juegos; Game theory; Presa de decisions; Toma de decisiones; Decision making; Vot; Voto; Voting; Teoria de l'aparellament; Teoría del emparejamiento; Matching theory; Microeconomia; Microeconomía; Microeconomics

Materias

33 - Economía

Área de conocimiento

Ciències Jurídiques, Econòmiques i Socials

Nota

Programa de Doctorat en Economia

Documentos

GDG_PhD_THESIS.pdf

916.7Kb

 

Derechos

ADVERTIMENT. Tots els drets reservats. L'accés als continguts d'aquesta tesi doctoral i la seva utilització ha de respectar els drets de la persona autora. Pot ser utilitzada per a consulta o estudi personal, així com en activitats o materials d'investigació i docència en els termes establerts a l'art. 32 del Text Refós de la Llei de Propietat Intel·lectual (RDL 1/1996). Per altres utilitzacions es requereix l'autorització prèvia i expressa de la persona autora. En qualsevol cas, en la utilització dels seus continguts caldrà indicar de forma clara el nom i cognoms de la persona autora i el títol de la tesi doctoral. No s'autoritza la seva reproducció o altres formes d'explotació efectuades amb finalitats de lucre ni la seva comunicació pública des d'un lloc aliè al servei TDX. Tampoc s'autoritza la presentació del seu contingut en una finestra o marc aliè a TDX (framing). Aquesta reserva de drets afecta tant als continguts de la tesi com als seus resums i índexs.

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