Calendrier du 18 juin 2020
TOM (Théorie, Organisation et Marchés) Lunch Seminar
Du 18/06/2020 de 14:00 à 15:00
online
RACHIDI Tobias (University Bonn)
Sequential Voting and the Weights of Nations
This paper studies the design of voting mechanisms for institutions of
representative democracy where representatives participate in the collective
decision-making process on behalf of groups of citizens having different
sizes. Most of the previous literature focused on the case of two
alternatives, whereas I allow for more than two alternatives while assuming
that preferences are single-peaked. First, I establish that strategy-proof
and surjective social choice functions can be implemented dynamically via
the successive voting procedure that is frequently used in practice. Second,
I consider preference distributions such that it is optimal for all groups
to aggregate preferences within groups according to simple majority voting
and characterize the welfare-maximizing mechanism among all strategy-proof
and surjective social choice functions for the collective decision-making
process
involving the representatives. The optimal mechanism takes the form of a
weighted successive voting procedure where the majority requirement is
monotonically decreasing along the sequence of ballots and the weights of
nations exhibit degressive proportionality, that is, the weights are
increasing, but the weights per citizen are decreasing in the group size.
However, for large group sizes, the degree of overweighting smaller groups
relative to the proportional benchmark is lower compared to a square root
rule, challenging previous results from the literature. Moreover, the
overweighting of smaller groups is larger for more moderate alternatives
compared to more extreme alternatives.
Behavior seminar
Du 18/06/2020 de 11:00 à 12:00
Online
ROTH Jonathan (Brown University)
I Have Nothing Against Them, But...
écrit avec Leonardo Bursztyn, Ingar Haaland, Aakaash Rao
We study the use of excuses to justify socially stigmatized actions, such as opposing minority groups. Rationales to oppose minorities change some people’s private opinions, leading them to take anti-minority actions even if they are not prejudiced against minorities. When these rationales become common knowledge, prejudiced people who are not persuaded by the rationale can pool with unprejudiced people who are persuaded. This decreases the stigma associated with anti-minority expression, increasing public opposition to minority groups. We examine this mechanism through several large-scale experiments in the context of anti-immigrant behavior in the United States. In the first main experiment, participants learn about a study claiming that immigrants increase crime rates and then choose whether to authorize a publicly observable donation to an anti-immigrant organization. Informing participants that others will know that they learned about the study substantially increases donation rates. In the second main experiment, participants learn that a previous respondent authorized a donation to an anti-immigrant organization and then make an inference about the respondent’s motivations. Participants who are informed that the respondent learned about the study prior to authorizing the donation see the respondent as less intolerant and more easily persuadable.
Texte intégral
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Du 18/06/2020 de 11:00 à 12:00
IRAIZOZ Ander ()
Saving for retirement through the public pension system: Evidence from the self-employed in Spain
Using the fact that the Spanish self-employed voluntarily choose their contributions to social security, I study the impact of financial incentives on public pension savings for the self-employed in Spain. For this, I implement a Difference-in-Difference approach exploiting the change in financial incentives for public pension savings induced by the 1997 pension reform in Spain. I find the Spanish self-employed significantly respond to the financial incentives for public pension savings. However, the estimated response could be considered small relative to the magnitude of the return to contributions provided by pension formulas in Spain. I provide further evidence suggesting that the lack of salience of the return to contributions could be one of the main drivers of such a modest response.