Lawlessness and economics Dixit, Avinash K; Dixit, Avinash K
2004., 20111023, 2011, 2004, 2004-01-01, 20040101, Letnik:
1
eBook
How can property rights be protected and contracts be enforced in countries where the rule of law is ineffective or absent? How can firms from advanced market economies do business in such ...circumstances? In Lawlessness and Economics, Avinash Dixit examines the theory of private institutions that transcend or supplement weak economic governance from the state.
The presence of prosocial preferences is thought to reduce significantly the difficulty of solving societal collective action problems such as providing public goods (or reducing public bads). ...However, prosociality is often limited to members of an in-group. We present a general theoretical model where society is split into subgroups and people care more about the welfare of others in their own subgroup than they do about those in out-groups. Individual contributions to the public good spill over and benefit members in each group to different degrees. We then consider special cases of our general model under which we can examine the consequences of localized prosociality for the economic outcomes of society as a whole. We ask to what extent prosociality closes the welfare gap between the Nash equilibrium without prosociality and the social optimum. The answer depends on whether private and public inputs are good or poor substitutes in producing final output. Critically, the degree to which this welfare gap closes is a concave function of the level of prosociality in the case of poor substitutes, so even low levels of prosociality can lead to social welfare near the social optimum.
With an aim of enhancing drought tolerance using a marker‐assisted backcrossing (MABC) approach, we introgressed the “QTL‐hotspot” region from ICC 4958 accession that harbors quantitative trait loci ...(QTLs) for several drought‐tolerance related traits into three elite Indian chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) cultivars: Pusa 372, Pusa 362, and DCP 92‐3. Of eight simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers in the QTL‐hotspot region, two to three polymorphic markers were used for foreground selection with respective cross‐combinations. A total of 47, 53, and 46 SSRs were used for background selection in case of introgression lines (ILs) developed in genetic backgrounds of Pusa 372, Pusa 362, and DCP 92‐3, respectively. In total, 61 ILs (20 BC3F3 in Pusa 372; 20 BC2F3 in Pusa 362, and 21 BC3F3 in DCP 92‐3), with >90% recurrent parent genome recovery were developed. Six improved lines in different genetic backgrounds (e.g. BGM 10216 in Pusa 372; BG 3097 and BG 4005 in Pusa 362; IPC(L4‐14), IPC(L4‐16), and IPC(L19‐1) in DCP 92‐3) showed better performance than their respective recurrent parents. BGM 10216, with 16% yield gain over Pusa 372, has been released as Pusa Chickpea 10216 by the Central Sub‐Committees on Crop Standards, Notification and Release of Varieties of Agricultural Crops, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Government of India, for commercial cultivation in India. In summary, this study reports introgression of the QTL‐hotspot for enhancing yield under rainfed conditions, development of several introgression lines, and release of Pusa Chickpea 10216 developed through molecular breeding in India.
Indoor superspreading events are significant drivers of transmission of respiratory diseases. In this work, we study the dynamics of airborne transmission in consecutive meetings of individuals in ...enclosed spaces. In contrast to the usual pairwise-interaction models of infection where effective contacts transmit the disease, we focus on group interactions where individuals with distinct health states meet simultaneously. Specifically, the disease is transmitted by infected individuals exhaling droplets (contributing to the viral load in the closed space) and susceptible ones inhaling the contaminated air. We propose a modeling framework that couples the fast dynamics of the viral load attained over meetings in enclosed spaces and the slow dynamics of disease progression at the population level. Our modeling framework incorporates the multiple time scales involved in different setups in which indoor events may happen, from single-time events to events hosting multiple meetings per day, over many days. We present theoretical and numerical results of trade-offs between the room characteristics (ventilation system efficiency and air mass) and the group's behavioral and composition characteristics (group size, mask compliance, testing, meeting time, and break times), that inform indoor policies to achieve disease control in closed environments through different pathways. Our results emphasize the impact of break times, mask-wearing, and testing on facilitating the conditions to achieve disease control. We study scenarios of different break times, mask compliance, and testing. We also derive policy guidelines to contain the infection rate under a certain threshold.
Collective action by the business community to counter corruption in the award of government licenses and contracts is analyzed, by analogy with contract enforcement institutions studied by economic ...historians and contract law scholars. The suggested anti-corruption institution comprises a no-bribery norm, a system to detect violations, and a multilateral ostracism penalty upon conviction in a tribunal. In combination with formal state law, a business institution of sufficient quality—probability of detection and severity of punishment—can eliminate corruption; a less good institution helps reduce it. The legal and communal institutions together achieve substantially better outcomes than either by itself.
Political Polarization Dixit, Avinash K.; Weibull, Jörgen W.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
05/2007, Letnik:
104, Številka:
18
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Failures of government policies often provoke opposite reactions from citizens; some call for a reversal of the policy, whereas others favor its continuation in stronger form. We offer an explanation ...of such polarization, based on a natural bimodality of preferences in political and economic contexts and consistent with Bayesian rationality.
This article reviews Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s book The Narrow Corridor. They depict a constant tussle between “society,” which wants liberty but cannot sustain order, and “state,” which ...maintains order but grows oppressive. I argue that the book has a huge theme and an impressive historical sweep of supportive examples, but leaves many open questions. The two conceptual categories should be unpacked to examine complex interactions within and across them, and other examples that counter the authors’ thesis should be reckoned with. However, the authors deserve congratulations for a brilliantly written and thought-provoking book that will inspire much future research.
* This is the new edition of a popular student textbook. The first edition was well-received. The author has made revisions and additions to enhance the book's usefulness without destroying its ...distinctive character as a lucid, thorough, and readable text. It gives a broad treatment of optimization methods, building on simple economic theory and elementary linear algebra and calculus, and reinforcing each new mathematical idea by relating it to its economics application.
The Making of Economic Policy begins by observing that most countries' trade policies are so blatantly contrary to all the prescriptions of the economist that there is no way to understand this ...discrepancy except by delving into the politics. The same is true for many other dimensions of economic policy. Avinash Dixit looks for an improved understanding of the politics of economic policymaking from a transaction cost perspective. Such costs of planning, implementing, and monitoring an exchange have proved critical to explaining many phenomena in industrial organization. Dixit discusses the variety of similar transaction costs encountered in the political process of making economic policy and how these costs affect the operation of different institutions and policies. Dixit organizes a burgeoning body of research in political economy in this framework. He uses U.S. fiscal policy and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as two examples that illustrate the framework, and show how policy often deviates from the economist's ideal of efficiency. The approach reveals, however, that some seemingly inefficient practices are quite credible attempts to cope with transaction costs such as opportunism and asymmetric information.
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