Ted C Bergstrom

Motivations of Competing Altruists

Ted C. Bergstrom et al. — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 13:30:14 PDT

This is a preliminary report on our experimental work with competing altruists.

Ethics and the Volunteers' Dilemma

Ted C. Bergstrom — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:43:57 PDT

This paper explores the Nash equilibria that arise under alternative rules for ethical behavior in settings like the volunteers' dilemma and finds "optimal" ethical rules for such settings.

Single-payer Volunteers' Dilemma

Ted C. Bergstrom — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:37:33 PDT

The "Volunteers' Dilemma model which was introduced by Andreas Diekmann is a game theoretic model of diffusion of responsibility where only one person is needed to perform a publicly beneficial act, but many people could do it. Players do not know what the others have done. In the symmetric mixed strategy Nash equilibrium for this game, the probability that nobody takes action increases as the number of players increases. This paper shows that the same result holds even when volunteers are taken anonymously but only one person is selected to perform the action/

Models of Assortative Matching

Ted C. Bergstrom — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 14:19:27 PDT

This paper explores the theory and statistical identification of two distinct models of assortative matching. One model corresponds closely to Sewall Wright's F-statistic, also known as the coefficient of inbreeding, or index of assortativity. A second model is based on random encounters in which individuals are more likely to match on an encounter with their own type than with the other.

Review of Robert Frank's Darwin Economy

Ted C. Bergstrom — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 14:33:26 PDT

This is a short book review of Frank's ``Darwin Economy''.

The Good Samaritan and Traffic on the Road to Jericho

Ted C. Bergstrom — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:44:46 PDT

Driving along a lonely road, you come upon a stalled car and a motorist who appears to have run out of gas. You consider stopping to offer help, although this may cost you several minutes and some extra driving. Would your decision be different if the road were heavily travelled? If you were to run of gas, would you prefer that it be on a busy street or on a lonely road?

Librarians and the terrible fix: economics of the Big Deal

Ted C. Bergstrom — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:05:14 PDT

The academic journal market is characterized by delegated purchasing, unreliable signals of demand, and a complex, difficult-to-evaluate product. As a result, the demand for journals is highly inelastic to prices. Large commercial publishers have capitalized on this inelastic demand, by reducing competition through mergers and consolidations, by offering Big Deal bundled contracts, and raising their prices to levels far above average cost. We suggest that the demand for access to journal articles would be much more price elastic and the overall cost to the academic community would be lower if universities were to abstain from purchasing bundled site licenses at prices that greatly exceed average cost. So long as other libraries continue to purchase site licenses at inflated prices, a single university library cannot expect the price structure to change if it drops its Big Deal contract. Some libraries have, however, succeeded in saving significant amounts of money by means of hard bargaining. Others such as Stanford and California Institute of Technology have saved even more by eschewing bundled contracts and subscribing to only the most cost-effective single journals.

Human Capital in an Economic Growth Model

Ted C. Bergstrom — Fri, 07 May 2010 17:56:12 PDT

This is my Stanford Ph D thesis. It incorporates "human capital" into an economic growth model. Human capital accumulates because it is a luxury consumption good.

A Public Choice Framework for Controlling Transmissable and Evolving Diseases

Benjamin M. Althouse et al. — Fri, 07 May 2010 17:34:06 PDT

Big Macs and Eigenfactor Scores: Don't Let the Correlation Coefficients Fool You

Jevin D. West et al. — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 17:57:57 PDT

A recent article by Phil Davis suggested that the Eigenvalue metric does adds little useful information to the more simply calculated measure of total citations published by the ISI. This paper argues that Davis's claim is an instance of a classic statistical fallacy of spurious correlation. Based on an analysis of the entire 2006 ISI Journal Citation Reports, we show that there are statistically and economically significant differences between the Eigenfactor metrics and the ISI's impact factor and total citations.

The Uncommon Insight of Elinor Ostrom

Ted C. Bergstrom — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 17:34:31 PDT

Abstract Standard economic approaches to the problem of overuse of common property resources have emphasized two competing remedies, the Pigovian approach of corrective taxation and the property rights approach of internalizing externalities by means of assigning marketable property rights to individual owners with exclusive claim on the entire commons. Elinor Ostrom pursues a third approach, which is based on case studies of existing communities that have established successful and durable systems of managing common property resources. This paper discusses her work and suggests that economists with an interest in public policy have much to gain from becoming familiar with the work of Ostrom and her co-authors.

Ethics, Evolution, and games Among Neighbors

Ted C. Bergstrom — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 14:06:07 PST

Several similar maxims, known as "Golden Rules" are found in the writings of moral philosophers and religious teachers. Though similar, these maxims appeal to different principles; and do not always recommend the same actions nor lead to the same equilibrium outcome in interactive games. This paper examines some of these rules and explores the way that they may emerge as a result of biological or social evolution.

A public choice framework for controlling transmissable and evolving diseases

Ted C. Bergstrom et al. — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:17:59 PST

Control measures used to limit the spread of infectious disease often generate externalities. Vaccination for transmissible diseases can re- duce the incidence of disease even among the unvaccinated, whereas antimicrobial chemotherapy can lead to the evolution of antimicro- bial resistance and thereby limit its own eectiveness over time. We integrate the economic theory of public choice with mathematical models of infectious disease to provide quantitative framework for making allocation decisions in the presence of these externalities. To illustrate, we present a series of examples: vaccination for tetanus, vaccination for measles, antibiotic treatment of otitis media, and antiviral treatment of pandemic in uenza.

Stem Cell Matching for Patients of Mixed Race

Ted C. Bergstrom — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 11:52:44 PST

Patients with leukemia and other blood diseases stand a good chance of recovery and a return to normal life if they receive a stem cell transplant from a living donor. In the absence of a transplant, their survival prospects are grim. For a transplant to be successful, the human leukocyte antigens (HLA) of the donor and recipient must be a close genetic match. To facilitate non-sibling matches, the developed nations of the world have set up national volunteer registries. The larges such registry is the NMDP (National Marrow Donor Program). We estimate the distribution of HLA types for individuals of mixed race and calculate probabilities that persons of each specified mixed-race combination will find a match in the current NMDP registry. We use these statistics to estimate the expected number of lives saved from adding a person of specified race or mixed-race combination to the registry. Using standard economic estimates of the value of a statistical life, we estimate a dollar value of adding registrants of any specified race or mixed race.

On Capturing Oil Rents with a National Excise Tax

Ted Bergstrom — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:08:55 PDT

This paper argues that since the supply of oil in the ground is inelastic, the incidence of a sales tax on oil, maintained forever at a fixed rate, would fall entirely on the oil-suppliers. In the world economy, however, the elasticity of supply of oil to a single country depends on that country’s imports as a share of world output and on the elasticity of demand for that country. The paper calculates optimal tax rates for a country as a function of these variables and estimates optimal oil tax rates for the U.S., for some OECD countries separately, and for the U.S. plus the OECD collectively. Current U.S. tax rates are shown to be far below optimal values.

Evolution of Social Behavior: Individual and Group Selection Models

Ted Bergstrom — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:08:50 PDT

Comment on The Welfare Loss from Price Distortion

Ted Bergstrom — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:08:38 PDT

One of the most disconcerting results in welfare economics is the "paradox of the second best". In a general equilibrium, if there are distortions in more than one market, it may not be efficient to remove distortions in a single market if the other distortions are not removed as well. In 1970, Sonnenschein and Foster proved a remarkable result that reduced the sting of this paradox. They showed that fairly generally, at least one form of piecemeal reform, namely proportional reduction of price distortions would improve welfare in a one-consumer general equilibrium economy. Trout Rader wrote an interesting paper that extended the Sonnenschein-Foster result. The current paper, examines Rader's contribution and that of Foster and Sonnenschein.

On the Private Provision of Public Goods

Ted Bergstrom et al. — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:08:33 PDT

This paper was stimulated by a paper by Peter Ware, who used calculus first-order conditons to show that a redistribution of income that does not change the set of voluntary contributors leaves the supply of public goods unchanged. In general, redistributions can change the set of contributors and also the supply of public goods. But we show that even in the general case there are some remarkably sharp comparative statics results.

Free Labor for Costly Journals

Ted Bergstrom — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:08:27 PDT

Commercial publishers charge libraries about 6 times as much per page and 16 times as much per citation as nonprofit journals. The paper presents evidence that successful for profit journals are priced at several times average cost. They are able to earn "monopoly profits" despite free entry into the industry because journal reputation is the result of a kind of coordination game. The paper advocates withholding free referee services from overpriced journals.

Log-concave Probability and its Applications

Mark Bagnoli et al. — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:08:21 PDT

In many applications, assumptions about the log-concavity of a probability distribution allow just enough special structure to yield a workable theory. This paper catalogs a series of theorems relating log-concavity and/or log-convexity of probability density functions, distribution functions,reliability functions, and their integrals. We list a large number of commonly-used probability distributions and report the log-concavity or log-convexity of their density functions and their integrals. We also discuss a variety of applications of log-concavity that have appeared in the literature.