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Berno Büchel
Former Member
Title
Dr.
Last Name
Büchel
First name
Berno
Phone
+41 71 224 2313
RePec
https://ideas.repec.org/e/pbc3.html
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1 - 5 of 5
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PublicationBlack Sheep or Scapegoats? Implementable Monitoring Policies under Unobservable Levels of MisbehaviorAn authority delegates a monitoring task to an agent. Thereby, it can only observe the number of detected offenders, but neither the monitoring intensity chosen by the agent nor the resulting level of misbehavior. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the implementability of monitoring policies. When several monitoring intensities lead to an observationally identical outcome, only the minimum of these is implementable, which can lead to under-enforcement. A comparative statics analysis reveals that increasing the punishment can undermine deterrence, since the maximal implementable monitoring intensity decreases. When the agent is strongly intrinsically motivated to curb crime, our results are mirrored and only high monitoring intensities are implementable. Then, higher monetary rewards for detections lead to a lower monitoring intensity and to a higher level of misbehavior.
Scopus© Citations 1 -
PublicationType: journal articleJournal: Journal of Economic TheoryVolume: 154Issue: C
Scopus© Citations 28 -
PublicationCondorcet winners on median spacesWe characterize the outcome of majority voting for single-peaked preferences on median spaces. This large class of preferences covers a variety of multidimensional policy spaces including products of lines (e.g. grids), trees, and hypercubes. Our main result is the following: If a Condorcet winner (i.e. a winner in pairwise majority voting) exists, then it coincides with the appropriately defined median ("the median voter"). This result generalizes previous findings which are either restricted to a one-dimensional policy space or to the assumption that any two voters with the same preference peak must have identical preferences. The result applies to models of spatial competition between two political candidates. A bridge to the graph-theoretic literature is built.Type: journal articleJournal: Social Choice & WelfareIssue: 42
Scopus© Citations 5 -
PublicationThe dynamics of closeness and betweennessAlthough both betweenness and closeness centrality are claimed to be important for the effectiveness of someone's network position, it has not been comprehensively studied which networks emerge if actors strive to optimize their centrality in the network in terms of betweenness and closeness. We study each of these centrality measures separately, but we also analyze what happens if actors value betweenness and closeness simultaneously. Network dynamics differ considerably in a scenario with either betweenness or closeness incentives compared with a scenario in which closeness and betweenness incentives are combined. There are not only more stable networks if actors' betweenness and closeness are combined, but also these stable networks are less stylized.Type: journal articleJournal: Journal of Mathematical SociologyVolume: 37Issue: 3
Scopus© Citations 22 -
PublicationThe Swing Voter's Curse in Social NetworksWe study private communication between jury members who have to decide between two policies in a majority vote. While interests of all agents are perfectly aligned, only some agents ("experts") receive a private noisy signal about which policy is correct. Each expert can, but need not, recommend a policy to her audience of "non-experts" prior to the vote. We show theoretically and empirically that communication can undermine (informational) efficiency of the vote and hence reduce welfare. Both efficiency and stability of communication hinge on the structure of the communication network. If some experts have distinctly larger audiences than others, non-experts should not follow their voting recommendation. We test the model in a lab experiment and find supporting evidence for this effect and, more generally, for the importance of the network structure.Type: working paper