The Complexity of Economic Policy: I. Restricted Local Optima in Tax Policy Design Economists traditionally tackle normative problems by computing optimal policy, i.e. the one that maximizes a social welfare function. In practice, however, a succession of marginal changes to a limited number of policy instruments are implemented, until no further improvement is feasible. I call such an outcome ...

abstract this paper proposes an approach to find an optimum structure for educational levels of human forces. to this end, a linear programming (lp) model integrated with a social accounting matrix (sam) was employed. the integrated model was employed using the sam of golestan province of iran. it was demonstrated that when unemployment is the result of inconsistency between supply and demand f...

In [MP08] L. Marengo and C. Pasquali present a model of object construction in majority voting and show that, in general, by appropriate changes of such bundles, different social outcomes may be obtained. In this paper we extend and generalize this approach by providing a geometric model of individual preferences and social aggregation based on hyperplanes and their arrangements. As an applicat...

Humans do not always make rational choices, a fact that experimental economics is putting on solid grounds. The social context plays an important role in determining our actions, and often we imitate friends or acquaintances without any strategic consideration. We explore here the interplay between strategic and social imitative behavior in a coordination problem on a social network. We observe...

"An ethical objection is raised against the Blackorby-Donaldson criterion of optimum population maximizing the sum total of utilities in excess of some critical level, since it may disprefer a social state with more people and with more worthwhile lives. However, the criterion may serve as a practicably reasonable compromise between maximizing total and average utility. Nevertheless, an alter...

We address the questions of disinvestment (partial privatization) and entry in the context of quantity competition between a partially privatized public bank and a private bank. We find that social welfare improves with entry only when the private banks are more efficient than the public bank. We also determine socially optimum degree of disinvestment and entry.

In a system in which noncooperative agents share a common resource, we propose the ratio between the worst possible Nash equilibrium and the social optimum as a measure of the eeectiveness of the system. Deriving upper and lower bounds for this ratio in a model in which several agents share a very simple network leads to some interesting mathematics, results, and open problems.

sarcheshmeh copper complex is the largest producer of copper in iran. with copper production, high amounts of so2 are being produced in this complex and emmited into the environment. so, in this study, the social optimum level of so2 released from this complex and the optimal tax rate will be evaluated. for this purpose, md and mac curves were estimated. the wtp for the reduction of so2 emissio...