Agency and Dynamics in Political Economy

政治经济学中的代理与动态

• 批准号: 9817727
• 负责人: Avinash Dixit
• 金额: $ 16.6万
• 依托单位: Princeton University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1999
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1999-04-01 至 2002-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9817727&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Agency; Dynamics; Political; Economy

The political process of economic policymaking involves several principal-agent relationships, where an agent takes an action or decision on behalf of a principal, and the principal offers incentives to induce the agent to act in the principal's best interest. Most notably, there are common agencies where several principals acting non-cooperatively try to influence the choices of the agent. The process also extends through time. This requires the political actors to make choices under uncertainty. It also allows some cooperation cooperation in conflicts like prisoners' dilemmas. The proposed research builds on and applies these two broad themes to several questions of theoretical and practical interest.1. The European Central Bank - The formal constitution of the ECB is similar to that of the Bundesbank - independent and dedicated to price stability. But in practice it can be influenced by the member governments. The Germans fear that such politicization will lead to excessive inflation. It is proposed to examine this question by theoretical modeling of two aspects of politicization. The first deals with non-cooperation, so the governments act as separate principals influencing their common agent. Preliminary analysis shows that this does not cause excessive inflation if the governments can commit to their incentive schemes for the ECB. The second deals with lack of commitment. This raises the usual problem of time-consistency in monetary policy, now compounded by a prisoners' dilemma among the several governments. Preliminary analysis shows that the results of this model conform well to intuition. Further research will examine the design of the optimal sustainable tacit cooperation in this dilemma game.2. Common Agency with Informed Principals - The European governments have private information on matters of common interest when they deal with the ECB; then their incentive schemes can reveal this information to the banker, and each government faces a situation formally like that of the winner's curse in its interaction with other governments. This observation suggests the need for a more general theory of common agency with informed multiprincipals. Such a theory will also find other useful applications. Most notably it can compare and reconcile two rival views in the theory of lobbying - one view holds that lobbies make contributions to "buy" policies, and the other argues that lobbies' main function is to provide information.3. Dynamics of Political Positioning - Some parties leave their policy positions vague; others take a clear and firm stand on issue positions. It is proposed to model this as a game of irreversible choices under uncertainty about voter preferences. The conjecture is that the party currently enjoying more popularity will keep its platform vague, while smaller parties take firm positions in the hope of entrenching themselves in the vote-rich part of the political spectrum.4. Other work - This consists of extensions and modifications of recent work, and includes the following. [i] A model of lobbying where the government acts as the principal and announces its policy as a response to contributions. [ii] A model oftacit compromise among several parties to split the available economic spoils as their political support fluctuates. [iii] Explaining the credibility of government's promise to repay its debt in terms of a correlation between political power and the propensity to hold government bonds.

经济政策制定的政治过程涉及几个委托-代理关系，其中代理人代表委托人采取行动或决定，委托人提供激励以诱导代理人按照委托人的最佳利益行事。最值得注意的是，在一些常见的代理中，几个不合作的委托人试图影响代理的选择。这个过程也随着时间的推移而延长。这就要求政治行为者在不确定的情况下做出选择。它也允许一些合作，比如囚犯困境中的合作。建议的研究建立在这两个广泛的主题上，并将其应用于理论和实践兴趣的几个问题。欧洲央行——欧洲央行的正式章程与德国央行类似——独立，致力于价格稳定。但在实践中，它可能受到成员国政府的影响。德国人担心这种政治化将导致过度通胀。本文建议通过对政治化两个方面的理论建模来检验这个问题。第一种是不合作，因此政府作为影响其共同代理人的独立委托人。初步分析表明，如果各国政府能够承诺实施针对欧洲央行的激励计划，这就不会导致过度通胀。第二个问题是缺乏承诺。这引发了货币政策时间一致性的常见问题，如今，几个国家的政府陷入了囚徒困境。初步分析表明，该模型的结果符合直觉。进一步的研究将探讨在这一困境博弈中最优可持续默契合作的设计。拥有知情负责人的共同机构——欧洲各国政府在与欧洲央行打交道时，就共同关心的问题拥有私人信息；然后，他们的激励机制可以将这些信息透露给银行家，每个政府在与其他政府的互动中都面临着一种形式上类似于赢家诅咒的情况。这一观察结果表明，需要一种更普遍的、具有知情多主体的共同代理理论。这样的理论还会找到其他有用的应用。最值得注意的是，它可以比较和调和游说理论中两种对立的观点——一种观点认为，游说团体为“购买”政策做出了贡献，另一种观点认为，游说团体的主要功能是提供信息。▽政治定位的动态=一些政党的政策立场模糊不清；其他人在问题立场上有明确而坚定的立场。有人建议将其建模为选民偏好不确定性下的不可逆选择博弈。据推测，目前更受欢迎的政党将保持其纲领模糊，而较小的政党则采取坚定的立场，希望在选票丰富的政治领域巩固自己的地位。其他工作-这包括对最近工作的扩展和修改，包括以下内容。一种游说模式，其中政府作为委托人，并宣布其政策作为对捐款的回应。[ii]随着政治支持的波动，几个政党之间默契妥协的模式，以瓜分可获得的经济利益。[iii]从政治权力与持有政府债券倾向之间的相关性来解释政府偿还债务承诺的可信度。