Open Access
Incentives to give up resource extraction and avoid the tragedy of the commons
(2013) Benito Ostolaza, Juan Miguel; Osés Eraso, Nuria; Economía; Ekonomia
This paper develops a general model of common resource extraction where we introduce payments for environmental services to encourage resource users to give up extraction. The goal is to reach a balance between resource use and conservation. As the essence of conservation is dynamic, we use a dynamic model to study the implementation of the compensation scheme. A stable heterogeneous equilibrium can be reached where both extractors and non-extractors live together. We analyze how the success of the compensation depends on factors such as the elasticity of demand and the biological characteristics of the resource.
Open Access
Sobre modelos dinámicos de segregación
(2001) Benito Ostolaza, Juan Miguel; Economía; Ekonomia
Este trabajo trata sobre los modelos dinámicos de segregación. En él se observan claramente las posiciones de algunos autores económicos, y sus aportaciones a la literatura sobre este tema. Se puede decir, que el artículo pionero fue el que escribió Thomas C. Schelling en 1971, y que es de lectura obligatoria para cualquiera que se adentre en este campo. En el documento, y basándonos en el artículo de Schelling, construimos un programa de ordenador, que simula el comportamiento de los individuos. Este comportamiento no se ajusta exactamente, al sugerido por Schelling en 1971, ni en su publicación posterior de 1978. Nuestro modelo, se ejecuta sobre la figura geométrica del Torus, lo cual justificamos a lo largo del trabajo, y no es una idea tan descabellada, ni tan lejana a lo que podemos encontrar en la literatura. ¿Por qué se separa la gente?¿Cómo se segregan los individuos? Estas preguntas quizá sean demasiado ambiciosas, y no es objetivo del trabajo darles una explicación coherente. Los individuos, se separan por muchas razones, y en multiples maneras. Existe segregación por sexo, edad, ingreso, lenguaje, religión, color, ventaja comparativa e incluso por los accidentes históricos de localización. Algunas segregaciones pueden resultar de las costumbres organizativas, o de diferentes sistemas de comunicación.El trabajo examina alguno de los incentivos individuales que pueden liderar colectivamente la segregación. Muestra, la manera en que algunas decisiones individuales, tienen resultados colectivos. Es decir, muestra algunos mecanismos que trasladan la conducta individual no organizada a resultados colectivos. El trabajo consta de siete epígrafes: El primero titulado Introducción, nos adentra en el objetivo y en el tema del Trabajo. El trabajo examina alguno de los incentivos individuales que pueden liderar colectivamente la segregación. Muestra, la manera en que algunas decisiones individuales, tienen resultados colectivos. Es decir, muestra algunos mecanismos que trasladan la conducta individual no organizada a resultados colectivos.El trabajo consta de siete epígrafes: El primero titulado Introducción, nos adentra en el objetivo y en el tema del Trabajo.El segundo, nos muestra diferentes modelos lineales que podemos encontrar en la literatura, y nos adentra en el mundo de la Path Dependency. El tercero, muestra el modelo espacial de Schelling, el cual es estudiado al detalle en este apartado, y, también, presenta nuestro modelo, ademas de algunos ejercicios realizados de estática comparativa, que sirven para ilustrar mejor la segregación colectiva. El cuarto, nos presenta las conclusiones principales obtenidas en el trabajo. El quinto, plantea una serie de cuestiones que, todavía, están sin resolver, que están pendientes y en las que estamos trabajando actualmente. El sexto es el apéndice.Éste, se divide en dos partes. La primera parte nos presenta el programa de ordenador que hemos construido, y explica con detalle las órdenes que le hemos impuesto y para que sirven. La segunda parte, presenta algunos resultados más, que avalan las hipótesis realizadas durante la exposición del trabajo en los apartados anteriores. Estos resultados, a diferencia de los mostrados en los epígrafes anteriores, se presentan tanto gráfica como matricialmente. El séptimo y último epígrafe, es la bibliografía, y en él se muestran las referencias bibliográficas que se han utilizado para tratar el tema expuesto, comprenderlo y obtener visiones alternativas que nos ayudaran en nuestra tarea.
Open Access
Market allocations of location choice: an example
(2003) Aizpurua Agirre, José María; Benito Ostolaza, Juan Miguel; Puértolas Sagardoy, Javier; Economía; Ekonomia
The purpose of this paper is to make an example which, first, illustrates Starret’s Spatial Imposibility Theorem, when agents have free mobility; and second, allowes us to get a competitive equilibrium with transportation when agents move only if there is a noticeable difference in utilities that justifies the change of location.
Open Access
Negative externalities in cropping decisions: private versus common land
(2013) Benito Ostolaza, Juan Miguel; Ezcurra Orayen, Roberto; Osés Eraso, Nuria; Economía; Ekonomia
This paper analyzes to what extent the definition of property rights affects cropping decisions when these decisions generate negative externalities. To that end, we implement an experimental study where agents make cropping decisions in two different treatments: private and common land. The results show that there are no statistically significant differences between the two treatments in the contribution to the negative externality, thus revealing that the definition of property rights does not affect cropping decision in this context. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the implication of the agents in activities generating negative externalities tends to increase over time, thus amplifying its adverse consequences.
Open Access
The location decisions of multinationals and the cultural link: evidence from Spanish direct investment abroad
(2008) Benito Ostolaza, Juan Miguel; Barrios, Salvador; Economía; Ekonomia
We examine the way in which differences in language and culture may affect direct investment decisions. We use a discrete choice approach to model the location decisions of multinationals in which cultural links, language differences, distance and market access are accounted for. This model is used to study the determinants of the location decisions of Spanish multinationals over the period 1988-1997. Cultural ties, including language, are found significantly to affect the location decisions of Spanish firms abroad. These ties, also explain the leading position of Spanish multinationals in Latin American countries compared to more advanced home countries such as the US, Germany and the UK. The specific advantage of Spanish multinationals together with the rapid economic development of the Spanish economy, which has traditionally been a large FDI-recipient, tend to corroborate the view that intangible assets such as culture and language proximity do matter in understanding net outward investment patterns.
Open Access
Claim problems and egalitarian criteria
(2010) Arin, Javier; Benito Ostolaza, Juan Miguel; Economía; Ekonomia
The paper presents a unified framework where claim and cost sharing problems are jointly analyzed. Both problems have the following common characteristic: given a proposal the agents valuate the suitability of the proposal in two ways, checking how much they loss and how much they gain. Taking this into account, we construct the vector of awards and losses for any proposal and we use different egalitarian criteria to select among these vectors. We use the Lorenz, the Least Square and the lexicographic criteria and we analyze the solutions arising from the application of these criteria in the sets of vectors of awards-losses. In particular, we characterize the members of two families of solutions: the family of Weighted Least Square Solutions and the family of Imputation Selector Weighted Least Square Solutions. The second family includes between its members well-known solutions as Constrained Equal Awards and Constrained Equal Losses solutions.
Open Access
Lorenz and lexicographic maximal allocations for bankruptcy problems
(2012) Arin, Javier; Benito Ostolaza, Juan Miguel; Economía; Ekonomia
This paper investigates the use of egalitarian criteria to select allocations in bankruptcy problems. In our work, we characterize the sets of Lorenz maximal elements for these problems. We show that the allocation selected by the Proportional Rule is the only allocation that belongs to all these Lorenz maximal sets. We prove that the Talmud Rule selects the lexicographic maximal element within a certain set. We introduce and analyze a new sharing rule for bankruptcy problems that shares strong similarities with the Talmud Rule.
Open Access
A mathematical approach to law and deal modelling: legislation and agreements
(MDPI, 2021) Benito Ostolaza, Juan Miguel; Campión Arrastia, María Jesús; Estevan Muguerza, Asier; Estatistika, Informatika eta Matematika; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE; Institute for Advanced Materials and Mathematics - INAMAT2; Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas
Social norms are a set of rules to be followed by the people of a community in order to have a better coexistence, to which the behaviors, tasks, and activities of the human being must be adjusted. The set or system of norms, rules, or duties regulates the actions of individuals among themselves. This work presents a new and original approach to the situations of agreement as well as to the constructions of regulations. This is done by giving a mathematical formalization to the set of all possible agreements or regulations, so that, then, the proximity between them is defined by means of a premetric. Thanks to this mathematical structure that tries to capture the problematic of agreements and modifications of regulations, some currently issues related to game theory or law are now reduced to mathematical optimization problems.
Open Access
Participation in and provision of public goods: does granularity matter?
(Springer, 2020) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Benito Ostolaza, Juan Miguel; Osés Eraso, Nuria; Ekonomia; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE; Economía
We use public goods games to experimentally investigate the effect of granularity (i.e., the degree of divisibility of the space of feasible contribution options) on participation (whether individuals contribute or not to the public good) and public goods provision (total contribution to the public good). Our results show that granularity has a significant effect on participation, mainly when coarser granularity eliminates the possibility of small contributions. However, this change in participation does not lead to a significant change in the total provision of the public good. These results are aligned with other experimental field results obtained in the context of donations and fundraising.
Open Access
Strategic behaviour in Schelling dynamics: theory and experimental evidence
(Elsevier, 2015) Benito Ostolaza, Juan Miguel; Brañas Garza, Pablo; Hernández, Penélope; Sanchis Llopis, Juan A.; Economía; Ekonomia
In this paper we experimentally test Schelling’s (1971) segregation model and confirm the striking result of segregation. In addition, we extend Schelling’s model theoretically by adding strategic behaviour and moving costs. We obtain a unique subgame perfect equilibrium in which rational agents facing moving costs may find it optimal not to move (anticipating other participants’ movements). This equilibrium is far from full segregation. We run experiments for this extended Schelling model, and find that the percentage of full segregated societies notably decreases with the cost of moving and that the degree of segregation depends on the distribution of strategic subjects.