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Browsing by Subject "Game theory"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Financing Infrastructure Over Time
    (American Society of Civil Engineers, 2001) Levinson, David M
    This paper investigates the problem of financing infrastructure over time when the number of users also changes. The problem is confronted in many fast-growing communities that need to coordinate the timing of infrastructure and development, yet still achieve economies of scale where they exist. The temporal free-rider problem is defined, whereby the group that finances the construction at a given time is not identical with the group that uses it. The continuous recovery method, which effectively establishes a property rights framework for infrastructure, is described. Continuous recovery enables existing residents to be appropriately compensated by new residents, independent of the number of new residents who ultimately arrive. The system is illustrated and compared with practice in a case that uses a noncontinuous cost recovery system.
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    Out-group homogeneity bias and strategic market entry.
    (2010-07) Bendle, Neil Thomas
    Out-group homogeneity bias is the tendency "...to perceive out-group members as being more homogeneous in their characteristics than in-group members" (Linville, Fischer and Salovey 1989). Globalization and the economic necessity for growing businesses to find new potential customers creates many situations in which marketers interact with out-groups. For example, marketers may serve such consumers in "foreign" countries or minority consumers at home with whom they do not identify. There is strong prima facie evidence that out-group homogeneity bias can influence marketing decisions through marketers underestimating taste variance in groups that they don't identify with. I investigate the effect of out-group homogeneity bias on a marketer's decisions and profits in a competitive scenario. To ensure a manageable scope, I focus on bias in strategic market entry decisions. This is an especially promising area of research as not only are out-groups commonly encountered in new markets, but marketers only make a handful of such decisions in their careers and the outcome of such decisions may make or break firms. The major contributions of this dissertation are in that it: (1) Examines how an extensively demonstrated bias would impact marketing. (2) Uses a model of market entry from theoretical biology examine the effects of errors in competition. (3) Demonstrates the impact a marketer's error in payoff perceptions has on competitors, showing how bias reduces the profits of the competitor of those experiencing the bias. (4) Shows that learning about the bias will be slow, at best. (5) Shows market selection will not necessarily remove the bias from a population of marketers and provides a critical theoretical justification for using behavioral considerations in the study of markets.
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    Why States Toll: An Empirical Model of Finance Choice
    (University of Bath, 2001) Levinson, David M
    This paper examines the question of why some states impose tolls while others rely more heavily on gas and other taxes. A model to predict the share of street and highway revenue from tolls is estimated as a function of the share of non-resident workers, the policies of neighboring states, historical factors, and population. The more non-resident workers, the greater the likelihood of tolling, after controlling for the miles of toll road planned or constructed before the 1956 Interstate Act. Similarly if a state exports a number of residents to work out-of-state and those neighboring states toll, it will be more likely to retaliate by imposing its own tolls than if those states don't. The policy implications for the future of congestion pricing are clear, if hard to implement. Decentralization of finance and control of the road network from the federal to the state, metropolitan and city and county levels of government will increase the incentives for the highway-managing jurisdiction to impose tolls. And tolls are a necessary prerequisite for an economically efficient strategy of congestion pricing.