Econometrica Submission Fees

This morning, a missive from the Econometrics society arrived in my in box announcing “two modest fees associated with the submission and publication of papers in its three journals.” As of May 1st 2020, the Society will assess a submission fee of $50 and a page charge of $10 per page for accepted papers. With papers on the short side running to around 30 pages and 10 page appendices this comes out to about $400. By the standards of the natural sciences this is indeed modest.

At the low end the American Meteorological Society charges $120 per page, no submission fee. In the middle tier, the largest open-access publishers — BioMed Central and PLoS — charge $1,350–2,250 to publish peer-reviewed articles in many of their journals, and their most selective offerings charge $2,700–2,900. At the luxury end of the market is the Proceedings of the National Academy which starts out at $1590 for 6 pages and rises upto $4,215 for a 12 page paper.

My colleague Aislinn Bohren has suggested rewarding referees with free page coupons: publish one page free for each five pages you referee. This may suffer the same fate as the Capitol Hill Baby Sitting co-operative.

In the short run the effect will be to drive papers to JET and GEB as not all academics have research budgets which will cover the fees. An alternative is to submit the paper for $50. If accepted, decline to have it published. Send it elsewhere and send a copy of the acceptance letter to one’s promotion and tenure committee. Voila, a new category in the CV: accepted at Econometrica but not published.

 

 

How Bibi changed the disagreement point

Time for some game theory about the recent development in Israeli politics. (You can read more about it here)

In the aftermath of the last election, no side could form a governing coalition. So the options were either a unity government, composed of the two major parties (Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud and Benny Gantz’ Kahol-Lavan) or yet another, fourth in a row, election. But with a year of election campaigns sowing hatred throughout the country, the ongoing coronavirus lockdown and an impending recession, nobody wants another election. So the two factions have to bargain on the terms of the unity government, with the possibility of another election being what game theorists call a disagreement point: this is what happens if negotiations break down.

Game theory teaches us that the disagreement point has a significant impact on the outcome, even when the parties reach an agreement, and that the better your position in the disagreement point, the better the bargaining outcome will be for you.

The disagreement point in the negotiation following the last election is impacted by two factors that did not exist in the previous rounds:

• The coronavirus came as a gift from the gods for Bibi. Frightened citizens usually stick with incumbent leaders in times of crisis, and in Bibi’s case, this tendency is magnified by the fact that he has been around for so many years. Even before the virus popped up, the greatest difficulty of the opposition was to convince the public that he is not the only person who is qualified for the prime-minister job. So an election will be advantageous to Bibi. Moreover, since the election will be postponed until after the lockdown, Bibi will likely stay in power for a long period even under the disagreement point.
• While he could not form a government, this time Gantz did manage to form a functioning majority coalition in the parliament. He was on the verge of electing a parliamentary speaker from his party, which would allow him to implement a law — the so-called “Bibi law” that forbids Bibi from being appointed for a  prime-minister due to the fact that he was indicted for bribery.

So, in terms of the disagreement point, Bibi has something good going for him and something bad going for him. So he made a threat: If you continue with your current plan to take over the parliament, I will abandon the negotiations and we will jump straight ahead to the disagreement point. Gantz, believing the threat, gave up on the plan. Instead, he promised to give the speakership to somebody from Bibi’s party and to join a government led by Bibi and, and he has split his own party for that purpose, bringing with him only half of it to the new coalition under Bibi.

So now Gantz made the disagreement point much better for Bibi and much worse from himself:
— If there is an election again, Gantz will be viewed as a fool who tore down his party for nothing, and he will likely not be elected.
— Gantz has made public that he too thinks Bibi should be a prime minister. This statement substantiates Bibi’s image as the only qualified person for the job. It also diminishes the moral argument against choosing an indicted person to prime-minister, which was the justification for Bibi’s law and a central theme in the campaign against him.
— Gantz currently took the speakership to himself. Joining Bibi’s government will force him to resign from the speakership, and he has already agreed to give it to Bibi’s party. After Bibi has the speakership, even before the government is formed, it is not possible to pass the Bibi law.

The alternative was to take over the parliament, uncover information about the government’s lack of preparation and incompetent handling of the corona crisis, and meanwhile negotiate secretly over the unity government. But without publicly supporting Bibi as the prime-minster until the deal is reached, all the while keeping the option of passing Bibi’s law if the negotiation fails. It’s hard to predict a bargaining outcome, but I think it is possible that under this plan, even if Bibi would have continued to be the prime minister for some time, we would see a meaningful division of power and a date for the termination of Bibi’s reign. Now there is no such hope.

Why did Gantz give up all his cards? I think the reason is that, because he believed in Bibi’s threat to abandon the negotiations, Gantz thought he had to choose between another election and a unity government. Indeed, Gantz conducted an election poll before he made this move, which suggests he was thinking in these terms.

Bibi’s threat, however, was empty, or, to use another game-theoretic jargon, not credible. The fact that the disagreement point would have become worse for Bibi precisely implies that, whatever he says now, he would have been willing to negotiate in order to escape it. The only difference is that the negotiation would be conducted in an environment that is less convenient to Bibi.
It is also not at all clear that the probability of reaching a deal has increased following Ganz’s move. In fact, an exultant Bibi might insist on terms that even Gantz will not be able to accept.

Many of Gantz’ voters are furious because they preferred another election over a Bibi government. But Gant’s voters who were willing to stomach a Bibi government should also be furious because Gantz created a bargaining environment in which he is desperate to achieve it.

Pass/Fail and Unraveling

With the move to on-line classes after spring break in the wake of Covid-19, my University has allowed students to opt to take some, all or none of their courses as pass/fail this semester. By making it optional, students have the opportunity to engage in signaling. A student doing well entering into spring break may elect to take the course for a regular grade confident they will gain a high grade. A student doing poorly entering into spring break may elect to take the course pass/fail. It is easy to concoct a simplified model (think Grossman (1981) or Milgrom (1981)) where there is no equilibrium in which all students elect to take the course pass/fail. The student confident of being at the top of the grade distribution has an incentive to choose the regular grading option. The next student will do the same for fear of signaling they had a poor grade and so on down the line. In equilibrium all the private information will unravel.

This simple intuition ignores the heterogeneity in student conditions. It is possible that a student with a good score going into spring break may now face straitened circumstances after spring break. How they decide depends on what inferences they think, others, employers, for example, make about grades earned during this period. Should an employer simply ignore any grades earned during this period and Universities issue Covid-19 adjusted GPAs? Should an employer conclude that a student with a poor grade is actually a good student (because they did not choose the pass/fail option) who has suffered bad luck?

Going On-line

In response to the Covid-19 virus a number of American Universities are moving instruction on-line. Some see this as great natural experiment to test the efficacy of virtual instruction (NO). Others believe it will speed the pace at which instruction  moves on-line (NO). The focus now is on execution at scale in a short period of time.  We would be better off canceling the rest of term and giving all the students A’s.

Here is what I predict will happen. Students will be dilatory in viewing lectures. Temptation and the difficulty of adjusting to new habits will be obstacles. When the exams approach, some will complain that they are unprepared because virtual is not as good as live, their instructor made a hash of things, the absence of live office hours, etc. etc. The exams will be take home without any proctors. While one’s own spirit is willing, there are doubts about the rectitude of one’s classmates.

On the other hand, during this period of exile, perhaps, there will emerge another Newton.

 

Who Should Quarantine?

An agent with an infectious disease confers a negative externality on the rest of the community. If the cost of infection is sufficiently high, they are encouraged and in some cases required to quarantine themselves. Is this the efficient outcome? One might wonder if a Coasian approach would generate it instead. Define a right to walk around when infected which can be bought and sold. Alas, infection has the nature of public bad which is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. There is no efficient, incentive compatible individually rational (IR) mechanism for the allocation of such public bads (or goods). So, something has to give. The mandatory quarantine of those who might be infected can be interpreted as relaxing the IR constraint for some.

If one is going to relax the IR constraint it is far from obvious that it should be the IR constraint of the infected. What if the costs of being infected vary dramatically? Imagine a well defined subset of the population bears a huge cost for infection while the cost for everyone else is minuscule. If that subset is small, then, the mandatory quarantine (and other mitigation strategies) could be far from efficient. It might be more efficient for the subset that bears the larger cost of infection to quarantine themselves from the rest of the community.