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We show that d'Aspremont and gevers' (1977) characterization of utilitarism can be strenghened in the following way. First, the condition of transitivity of the social preference relation is dropped and the Anonymity condition is slightly strengtened. (Our Anonymity condition is weaker than the combination of transitivityand d'Aspremont and Gever's Anonimity condition). Second, the Strong Pareto Principle is the Weak Pareto Principle.

In this paper we show that in a bargaining situation the seller may not necessarily want to fully exploit communication possibilities. In the standard two-period bargaining model with one-sided incomplete information, the seller, who owns an indivisible good, makes oers which the buyer can either accept or reject. We ask whether the seller can prot from manipulating the communication mechanism by sending offers that reach the buyer with probability less than one (noisy communication). Noisy communication is a way to improve the seller's second period beliefs about the buyer's willingness to pay for the good and is therefore a way to "buy" commitment. We study the case of a discrete distribution of buyer's types and show that there exist equilibria with noisy communication when there are at least three different types of buyers.

We study the differences in the impact of trade restrictions on the level of imports (e.g. 200,000 automobiles per years) and restrictions defined in terms of market shares (e.g. 10% of the market). We argue that if domestic firms enjoy some market power proportional trade restrictions have a stronger anticompetitive effect than volume restrictions, and therefore lead to higher equilibrium prices and lower social welfeare. In the case of Cournot competition and constant marginal costs, with proportional import restraints the equilibrium price sticks to the autarchic level, independently of the market share reserved for foreign firms. As a consequence, enlarging the share of imports does not increase consumers surplus and negatively affects the profits of domestic firms, thus lowering social welfare.

This paper studies the optimal lifetime of a patent in a model where the timing of innovatons: is uncertain. We assume a Poisson discovery process with a linear hazard function and contractural R&D costs. The invention industry is modelled in three alternative ways: i) monopoly; ii) oligopoly with free entry; iii) perfect competition. Several comparative staties results are derived.

The problem of extending an ordering on a set of alternatives to its power set is analysed. Kannai and Peleg (1984) and Barberà and Pattanaik (1984) have shown that no extention rule satisfies certain reasinable conditions. This paper prove a new impossibility results, using a condition, called Dominance principle, which states that if x is preferred to y, then (x,z) must be preferred to (y,z).

We model a duopoly with a private and a public firm under the hypothesis of vertical product differentiation. Firms choose their quality levels first and then prices. We ask which firm will choose to serve the higher (lower) segment of the market. When firms act simultaneously in each stage, there are two subgame perfect Nash equilibria entailing opposite rankings between the quality levels. If the State-owned firm has a move advantage, then there is a unique Stackelberg equilibrium in which the public firm serves the upper segment of the market.

Without spillovers and under the “winner-take-all” hypothesis, there is overinvestment in R&D in a non cooperative equilibrium. This is due to the so-called “common pool problem”, i.e., duplication of efforts. We show that a public firm can represent a useful instrument in the hands of a policymaker to mitigate such a problem. More precisely, it is provided that, in a mixed duopoly: (i) each firm invest less than in a private duopoly, (ii) although the expected time of innovation is postponed, social welfare is higher than in a private duopoly.

This paper analyses some monetary policy issues in a model of business cycle derived from Lucas (1972). We show that an autoregressive monetary policy rule may dominate a k-percent rule, and that the optimal monetary policy is characterised by an infinite amount of noise.

The main purpose of this paper is to show that the Cambridge Theorem holds independently of Ricardian Equivalence, if the net rate of profits is properly defined.

In this paper we study a one-shot game of R&D between two price-setting firms that are asymmetrically placed as they produce at different cost levels. The R&D technology displays increasing returns in the form of invisibilities. We show that there exists a unique equilibrium in pure strategies, and we prove that the incumbent has never greater probability of winning the patent race than the rival.

In this paper we study a one-shot game of R&D between two price-setting firms that are asymmetrically placed as they produce at different cost levels. First we prove the existence and the properties of a noncooperative equilibrium. Then, we show that the higher (lower) the discount rate, the lower (higher) the probability of innovating of the current leader. In a specialised version of the model we establish the effect of the productivity of R&D espenditure, initial cost gap, and market size on the expected identity of the winner of the patent race.

We study the R&D performance of Cournot aligopolists. To this end we model a one-shot noncooperative game in which firms invest in R&D, with the aim of being first in an uncertain competition for a patentable cost-reducing innovation. The incentives to innovate are market profits and not exogenously given prizes as in most of the earlier literature. Thus, incentives depend on the number of firms. We show that increasing rivalry may increase or decrease the individual R&D espenditure, there may be underinvestment with the various effect to the socially optimal level. Moreover, we identify the various effects which are responsible for the difference between our results and some conclusions of closely related contributions.

Since the work of Schumpeter, it has been argued that there may exist a trade-off between static and dynamic efficiency. As a contribution to this debate, in this paper we compare the R&D performance of CCournot and Bertrand oligopolists. We model a one-shot noncooperative game in which firms invest in R&D, with the aim of being first in a competition for a patentable cost-reducing innovation.

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is concerned with the problem of finding a collective choice rule which selects one or more alternatives from every non emplty subset of the universal set of alternatives.

We analyze games between two countries that use the tariff as a threat to induce each other to follow monetary policies equivalent to those that would obtain under a cooperative game. The analysis shows that under certain assumptions concerning the shares of tariff revenues that the countries spend on imports, the punishment structure, and the discount factors, the outcome of the games converges to a monetary policies. It is suggested that the model could be applaied to current relations between the US, Germany and Japan.

Il presupposto di questo lavoro è che le leggi di movimento del capitalismo possono essere considerate come il risultato di un conflitto permanente tra le due classi sociali antagoniste - lavoratori e capitalisti; un conflitto che riguarda in primo luogo la distribuzione del reddito ma anche la ripartizione delle risorse disponibili tra consumo e accumulazione.

Questa sezione è dedicata ad una esposizione della struttura di fondo degli Essays, che, come già detto, è largamente comune anche alle opere successive di Kalecki. Poiché di tratta degli aspetti più noti e meno controversi del pensiero kaleckiano, l'esposizione sarà il più possibile sintetica.