A question with a nice clean answer. When do market games have transferable utility? Subject to some regularity conditions, the answer is if and only if indirect utility can be represented in the Gorman polar form.

One remark explains how Cournot equilibrium responds to taxation on the duopolists. (To maximize revenue, tax 'em the same) The other remark answers the question, What does Cournot Equilibrium maximize.

We present examples of Nash equilibria that do not vary with the distribution of a parameter across agents and then offer a general theorem that characterizes this independence.

We consider a general model of the non-cooperative provision of a public good. Under very weak assumptions there will always exist a unique Nash equilibrium in our model. A smallredistribution of wealth among the contributing consumers will not change the equilibrium amount of the public good. However, larger redistributions of wealth will change the set of contributors and thereby change the equilibrium provision of the public good. We are able to characterize the properties and the comparative statics of the equilibrium in a quite complete way and to analyze the extent to which government provision of a public good ‘crowds out’ private contributions.

This paper was stimulated by a paper by Peter Ware, who used calculus first-order conditons to show that a redistribution of income that does not change the set of voluntary contributors leaves the supply of public goods unchanged. In general, redistributions can change the set of contributors and also the supply of public goods. But we show that even in the general case there are some remarkably sharp comparative statics results.

This paper uses the results of a natural experiment to assess consumer demand for a particular kind of privacy—protection from unwanted telemarketing calls. We obtained the phone numbers placed on the Federal Trade Commission's do-not-call (DNC) registry, redacted for privacy. After matching those numbers to demographic and other information based on geographic location, we regressed the observed signup frequencies on individual demographic variables to profile the DNC registrants. Grouped logits of county averages of signup frequencies were run on explanatory variables suggested by a simple choice model of the DNC registration decision and the calling pattern of telemarketers. We find that a parsimonious specification accounts for most of the variance explained by the full set of variables. Signup frequencies are larger in areas of higher incomes and greater educational attainment. They are lower for areas with greater incidence of Latino origin and linguistic isolation. The results show that a state DNC list acts as a substitute for the FTC registry unless the two are merged. Finally, we make some crude estimates of the value of the FTC's DNC list, and also use the signup patterns, and the apparent independence from Internet access, to predict the popularity of a hypothetical do-not-spam registry.