Scoring rules aggregate individual rankings by assigning some points to each position in each ranking such that the total sum of points provides the overall ranking of the alternatives. They are widely used in sports competitions consisting of multiple contests. We study the tradeoff between two risks in this setting: (1) the threat of early clinch when the title has been clinched before the last contest(s) of the competition take place; (2) the danger of winning the competition without finishing first in any contest. In particular, four historical points scoring systems of the Formula One World Championship are compared with the family of geometric scoring rules that have favourable axiomatic properties. The formers are found to be competitive or even better. The current scheme seems to be a reasonable compromise in optimising the above goals. Our results shed more light on the evolution of the Formula One points scoring systems and contribute to the issue of choosing the set of point values.

The Coase Theorem has a central place in the theory of environmental economics and regulation. But its applicability for solving real-world externality problems remains debated. In this paper, we first place this seminal contribution in its historical context. We then survey the experimental literature that has tested the importance of the many, often tacit assumptions in the Coase Theorem in the laboratory. We discuss a selection of applications of the Coase Theorem to actual environmental problems, distinguishing between situations in which the polluter or the pollutee pays. While limited in scope, Coasian bargaining over externalities offers a pragmatic solution to problems that are difficult to solve in any other way.

We study a self-reflexive DSGE model with heterogeneous households, aimed at characterising the impact of economic recessions on the different strata of the society. Our framework allows to analyse the combined effect of income inequalities and confidence feedback mediated by heterogeneous social networks. By varying the parameters of the model, we find different crisis typologies: loss of confidence may propagate mostly within high income households, or mostly within low income households, with a rather sharp crossover between the two. We find that crises are more severe for segregated networks (where confidence feedback is essentially mediated between agents of the same social class), for which cascading contagion effects are stronger. For the same reason, larger income inequalities tend to reduce, in our model, the probability of global crises. Finally, we are able to reproduce a perhaps counter-intuitive empirical finding: in countries with higher Gini coefficients, the consumption of the lowest income households tends to drop less than that of the highest incomes in crisis times.

A continuous variable changing between 0 and 1 is introduced to characterise contentment, or satisfaction with life, of an individual and an equation governing its evolution is postulated from analysis of several factors likely to affect the contentment. As contentment is strongly affected by material well-being, a similar equation is formulated for wealth of an individual and from these two equations derived an evolution equation for the joint distribution of individuals' wealth and contentment within a society. The equation so obtained is used to compute evolution of this joint distribution in a society with initially low variation of wealth and contentment over a long period time. As illustration of this model capabilities, effects of the wealth tax rate are simulated and it is shown that a higher taxation in the longer run may lead to a wealthier and more content society. It is also shown that lower rates of the wealth tax lead to pronounced stratification of the society in terms of both wealth and contentment and that there is no direct relationship between the average values of these two variables.

This paper illustrates the intergenerational transmission of the gender gap in education among first and second-generation immigrants. Using the Current Population Survey (1994-2018), we find that the difference in female-male education persists from the home country to the new environment. A one standard deviation increase of the ancestral country female-male difference in schooling is associated with 17.2% and 2.5% of a standard deviation increase in the gender gap among first and second generations, respectively. Since gender perspective in education uncovers a new channel for cultural transmission among families, we interpret the findings as evidence of cultural persistence among first generations and partial cultural assimilation of second generations. Moreover, Disaggregation into country-groups reveals different paths for this transmission: descendants of immigrants of lower-income countries show fewer attachments to the gender opinions of their home country. Average local education of natives can facilitate the acculturation process. Immigrants residing in states with higher education reveal a lower tendency to follow their home country attitudes regarding the gender gap.

We consider an auction type equilibrium model with an insider in line with the one originally introduced by Kyle in 1985 and then extended to the continuous time setting by Back in 1992. The novelty introduced with this paper is that we deal with a general price functional depending on the whole past of the aggregate demand, i.e. we work with path-dependency. By using the functional It\^o calculus, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of an equilibrium. Furthermore, we consider both the cases of a risk-neutral and a risk-averse insider.

Integrating renewable energy production into the electricity grid is an important policy goal to address climate change. However, such an integration faces economic and technological challenges. As power generation by renewable sources increases, power transmission patterns over the electric grid change. Due to physical laws, these new transmission patterns lead to non-intuitive grid congestion externalities. We derive the conditions under which negative network externalities due to power trades occur. Calibration using a stylized framework and data from Europe shows that each additional unit of power traded between northern and western Europe reduces transmission capacity for the southern and eastern regions by 27% per unit traded. Such externalities suggest that new investments in the electric grid infrastructure cannot be made piecemeal. In our example, power infrastructure investment in northern and western Europe needs an accompanying investment in southern and eastern Europe as well. An economic challenge is regions facing externalities do not always have the financial ability to invest in infrastructure. Power transit fares can help finance power infrastructure investment in regions facing network congestion externalities. The resulting investment in the overall electricity grid facilitates integration of renewable energy production.

Differences in political ideology are increasingly appearing as an impediment to successful bipartisan communication from local leadership. For example, recent empirical findings have shown that conservatives are less likely to adhere to COVID-19 health directives. This behavior is in direct contradiction to past research which indicates that conservatives are more rule abiding, prefer to avoid loss, and are more prevention-motivated than liberals. We reconcile this disconnect between recent empirical findings and past research by using insights gathered from press releases, millions of tweets, and mobility data capturing local movement in retail, grocery, workplace, parks, and transit domains during COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders. We find that conservatives adhere to health directives when they express more fear of the virus. In order to better understand this phenomenon, we analyze both official and citizen communications and find that press releases from local and federal government, along with the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, lead to an increase in expressions of fear on Twitter.

In our multi-agent model agents generate wealth from repeated interactions for which a prisoner's dilemma payoff matrix is assumed. Their gains are taxed by a government at a rate $\alpha$. The resulting budget is spent to cover administrative costs and to pay a bonus to cooperative agents, which can be identified correctly only with a probability $p$. Agents decide at each time step to choose either cooperation or defection based on different information. In the local scenario, they compare their potential gains from both strategies. In the global scenario, they compare the gains of the cooperative and defective subpopulations. We derive analytical expressions for the critical bonus needed to make cooperation as attractive as defection. We show that for the local scenario the government can establish only a medium level of cooperation, because the critical bonus increases with the level of cooperation. In the global scenario instead full cooperation can be achieved once the cold-start problem is solved, because the critical bonus decreases with the level of cooperation. This allows to lower the tax rate, while maintaining high cooperation.

This paper develops a theoretical model to study the economic incentives for a social media platform to moderate user-generated content. We show that a self-interested platform can use content moderation as an effective marketing tool to expand its installed user base, to increase the utility of its users, and to achieve its positioning as a moderate or extreme content platform. The optimal content moderation strategy differs for platforms with different revenue models, advertising or subscription. We also show that a platform's content moderation strategy depends on its technical sophistication. Because of imperfect technology, a platform may optimally throw away the moderate content more than the extreme content. Therefore, one cannot judge how extreme a platform is by just looking at its content moderation strategy. Furthermore, we show that a platform under advertising does not necessarily benefit from a better technology for content moderation, but one under subscription does. This means that platforms under different revenue models can have different incentives to improve their content moderation technology. Finally, we draw managerial and policy implications from our insights.

We find UK 'local lockdowns' of cities and small regions, focused on limiting how many people a household can interact with and in what settings, are effective in turning the tide on rising positive COVID-19 cases. Yet, by focusing on household mixing within the home, these local lockdowns have not inflicted the large declines in consumption observed in March 2020 when the first virus wave and first national lockdown occurred. Our study harnesses a new source of real-time, transaction-level consumption data that we show to be highly correlated with official statistics. The effectiveness of local lockdowns are evaluated applying a difference-in-difference approach which exploits nearby localities not subject to local lockdowns as comparison groups. Our findings indicate that policymakers may be able to contain virus outbreaks without killing local economies. However, the ultimate effectiveness of local lockdowns is expected to be highly dependent on co-ordination between regions and an effective system of testing.