This paper studies the problem of random assignment with fractional endowments. Fractional endowments complicate matters because the assignment has to make an agent weakly better off than his endowment. I first formulate an exchange economy that resembles the random assignment problem and prove the existence of competitive equilibrium in this economy. I then propose a pseudo-market mechanism fo...

Empirical evidence suggests that regional disparities in incomes are often very high, that these disparities do not necessarily disappear as economies grow and that these disparities are itself an important driver of growth. We use a novel approach based on multilevel modeling to decompose the sources of spatial disparities in incomes among households in Burkina Faso. We show that spatial dispa...

Only 5.5 percent of black males married white females in 1990, and the family-income premium for intermarried black males was 7 percent. This paper estimates the impact of the mating taboo, courting opportunities, and individual endowments on the black male marriage market. Results indicate that eliminating the mating taboo would raise the intermarriage rate from 5.5 to 64 percent, and do away ...

the increase of incomes in irans endowents (waqfs) could have an outstanding role in providing a part of public services needed in the society and betterment of income distribution and as a result endowers and benefactors would play a part in meeting greater portion of these services. materializing this objective requires an all-out development of endowment (waqt) services as wall as better ope...

To prove their Walrasian equilibrium existence theorem, Arrow and Debreu (1954) devised an abstract economy that Shapley and Shubik (1977) cricitized as a market game because, especially with untrustworthy traders, it fails to determine a credible outcome away from equilibrium. All this earlier work also postulated a Walrasian auctioneer with complete information about traders’ preferences and ...

This paper demonstrates the generic existence of general equilibria in incomplete markets. Our economy is a model of two periods, with uncertainty over the state of nature to be revealed in the second period. Securities are claims to commodity bundles in the second period that are contingent on the state of nature, and are insufficient in number to span all state contingent claims to value, reg...

In the Edgeworth non-tatonnement process, trade occurs if there exists some coalition of agents able to make a Paretoimproving trade among themselves at current prices. It is known that the size of such coalitions is bounded by the number of commodities and that, provided all agents always have strictly positive endowments, bilateral trade suffices. These results are generalized: Let there be h...

Africa is well endowed with potential for hydro and solar power, but its other endowments – shortages of capital, skills, and governance capacity – make most of the green options relatively expensive, while its abundance of hydro-carbons makes fossil fuels relatively cheap. Current power shortages make expansion of power capacity a priority. Africa’s endowments, and the consequent scarcities an...

Preferences and endowments. Consider a static endowment economy populated by a continuum of households. The households have identical preferences expressed by a strictly increasing strictly concave utility function U(c) over a single consumption good. The households have heterogeneous endowments y ∈ [0,∞) of this single consumption good distributed with density f(y) > 0 in the population. Let Y...

We consider all-pay auctions in the presence of interdependent, affiliated valuations and private budget constraints. For the sealed-bid, all-pay auction we characterize a symmetric equilibrium in continuous strategies for the case of N bidders. Budget constraints encourage more aggressive bidding among participants with large endowments and intermediate valuations. We extend our results to the...