This note develops a simple model to illustrate formally why ungoverned spaces are an economic puzzle. It would be surprising for a social welfare maximizing government to leave space ungoverned (i.e., with no local public good provision) because we think of public goods as efficient. Yet if public goods are efficient enough for a responsive government to provide them, even a kleptocrat would p...

The Internet world as we know it today has undergone far-reaching changes since its early days while becoming a critical communications underpinning our economic performance and social welfare. The 3D Internet is poised to replace the 2D Internet as we know it today. This paper takes a look at the two types of Internet, advantages and disadvantages and the future of the present Internet as we k...

Malapportionment of state legislatures before the mid-1960s gave urban and suburban voters much less representation than they deserved. This Essay documents that suburban and urban voters had markedly different policy preferences, party identifications, and partisan voting behaviors than voters in rural areas, who were overrepresented. However, the patterns were not uniform. In the Northeast an...

We introduce a noncooperative multilateral bargaining model for a network-restricted environment, in which players can communicate only with their neighbors. Each player can strategically choose the bargaining partners among the neighbors and buy their communication links with upfront transfers. We characterize a condition on network structures for efficient equilibria: An efficient stationary ...

This paper analyzes the rating of a product of unknown quality by a certi er who internalizes the buyers' surplus and receives payments from a seller. It shows that contrary to conventional wisdom, a regulation that prohibits contingent payments hinders information revelation and harms social welfare when the contract between seller and certi er is public. If the contract is private (buyers do ...

This paper discussed the analysis of the survey on sustainability of bioenergy conducted in the Philippines, India and China. It acquired general perceptions of the people by asking them (a) specific questions about their level of familiarity with bioenergy; (b) relationship of their work to bioenergy; and (c) their opinion on contribution of various feedstock on the economy and impact of bioen...

BACKGROUND New Zealand's health system has long been seen as providing highly fragmented, poorly co-ordinated services to service users. A continuing policy challenge has been how to reduce such fragmentation and achieve more 'integrated' care, that is, 'co-ordinated' care that provides a 'smooth and continuous' transition between services, and a 'seamless' journey as service users receive heal...

This paper is an exercise in meta-analysis. It brings together several strands of research to examine whether they fit together to produce a socio-economic (briefly, social) model that can be more conducive to sustainability. By “social model” we are referring to the configuration of a society, including its economy, politics, knowledge, and culture. The call for such a model is getting louder ...

In this paper, we consider a network of agents producing a positional good; an agent’s utility for the good is a function of both his intrinsic value for the good and his status, or production level relative to the production levels of his neighbors. We demonstrate that the set of Nash equilibria of our game form a complete lattice, and that natural best-reply dynamics from certain initial conf...

In China, many ongoing problems in the electricity sector can be traced back to the old ‘centrally planned’ economy. Since the start of liberalization in the 1980s, the clash between a liberalized economy (excluding a few so-called strategic industries) and a centrally controlled electricity industry has gradually become more and more apparent. The Chinese electricity industry is in need of con...