Calendrier du 25 septembre 2023
Roy Seminar (ADRES)
Du 25/09/2023 de 17:00 à 18:15
Salle R1-09, Campus Jourdan, 75014 Paris
SAFONOV Evgenii (Queen Mary University of London)
Slow and Easy, a Theory of Browsing
An agent needs to choose the best alternative drawn randomly with replacement from a menu
of unknown composition. The agent is boundedly rational and employs an automaton decision
rule: she has finitely many memory states, and, in each, she can inquire about some attribute of
the currently drawn alternative and transition (possibly stochastically) either to another state or
to a decision. Defining the complexity of a decision rule by the number of transitions, I study the
minimal complexity of a decision rule that allows the agent to choose the best alternative from
any menu with probability arbitrarily close to one. Agents in my model differ in their languages—
collections of binary attributes used to describe alternatives. My first result shows that the tight
lower bound on complexity among all languages is 3, where m is the number of alternatives valued distinctly. My second result provides a linear upper bound. Finally, I call adaptive
a language that facilitates additive utility representation with the smallest number of attributes.
My third result shows that an adaptive language always admits the least complex decision rule
that solves the choice problem. When for a natural n, a language admits the
least complex decision rule if and only if it is adaptive.
Texte intégral
Régulation et Environnement
Du 25/09/2023 de 12:00 à 13:30
R1-09
FRANK Eyal (University of Chicago)
*The Cost of Species Protection: The Land Market Impacts of the Endangered Species Act
écrit avec Maximilian Auffhammer, David W. McLaughlin, Elisheba Spiller, David L. Sunding
Protecting species' habitats is the main policy tool employed across the globe in order to reduce biodiversity losses. These protections are hypothesized to conflict with private landowners' interests. We study the economic consequences of the most extensive and controversial piece of such environmental legislation in US history—the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973. Using the most comprehensive data on species conservation efforts, land transactions, and building permits to date, we show evidence that on average the ESA does not affect regulated land markets in measurable and economically significant ways. We show that the Act's most stringent habitat protections lead to a slight increase in the value of residential properties on land that is just adjacent to protected areas. These findings mask heterogeneity at the species level, which we document. Further, we find no evidence of the ESA affecting building activity as measured by construction permits. Overall, even taking into account species level heterogeneity, the number of possibly negatively affected parcels is extremely small, suggesting that the capitalization of the economic impacts of the ESA through the land market channel are likely minor, despite potential delays to development through permitting, which we document.