Which rationing rule does a single consumer follow?

We will investigate the amount of residual demand in a market consisting of only one consumer and two producers. Since there is only one consumer, we cannot really speak about a rationing rule, but we can ask ourselves whether a known rationing rule reflects the consumer’s utility maximizing behavior. We will show that, if the consumer has a Cobb-Douglas utility function, then the amount purchased by the consumer from the high-price firm lies between the values determined according to the efficient rationing rule and the random rationing rule. We will show further, that if the consumer has a quasilinear utility function, then in the economically interesting case his residual demand function will be equal to the residual demand function under efficient rationing.

Aranyszabály helyett adósságfék - a német példa = Debt-brake instead of the golden rule - the case of Germany

Az Európai Unió megújuló gazdasági kormányzási rendszerének egyik meghatározó pillére a diszkrecionális gazdaságpolitikával szemben megfogalmazott szabályalapúság lesz. A minden korábbinál erősebb és vélhetően hatékonyabb szabályok bevezetésének legelkötelezettebb híve Németország. Az elmúlt évtizedekben a folyó költségvetési kiadások hiányból történő finanszírozásának tilalmát előíró aranyszabályt inkább kevesebb, mint több sikerrel alkalmazó Németország most arra vállalkozott, hogy nem csak saját hatáskörben vezeti be az ún. adósságféket, hanem követendő példaként állítja azt a többi tagország elé is. Írásunkban az aranyszabály, illetve az adósságfék előnyeit és hátrányait vesszük számba a német tapasztalatok felhasználásával. / === / The need to strengthen rules-based fiscal policy has emerged as a widely shared consensus amongst policy-makers in the recent economic and financial crisis. Germany has become the most devoted advocator of the new regime, where more innovative and effective fiscal rules are supposed to play an even bigger role than before. Germany supports such a move however not only in rhetoric but also in practice. It decided to abandon its several decade old golden rule and to adopt a more sophisticated one, the so-called debt-brake. This article provides a cost-benefit analysis of both the previous and the new fiscal rule.

Neural networks would 'vote' according to Borda's Rule

Can neural networks learn to select an alternative based on a systematic aggregation of convicting individual preferences (i.e. a 'voting rule')? And if so, which voting rule best describes their behavior? We show that a prominent neural network can be trained to respect two fundamental principles of voting theory, the unanimity principle and the Pareto property. Building on this positive result, we train the neural network on profiles of ballots possessing a Condorcet winner, a unique Borda winner, and a unique plurality winner, respectively. We investigate which social outcome the trained neural network chooses, and find that among a number of popular voting rules its behavior mimics most closely the Borda rule. Indeed, the neural network chooses the Borda winner most often, no matter on which voting rule it was trained. Neural networks thus seem to give a surprisingly clear-cut answer to one of the most fundamental and controversial problems in voting theory: the determination of the most salient election method.