Drawing on internal records from a Colombian coffee processor and exporter, we explore the relationship between price-cost margins and product quality. We find that higher-quality coffee is sold at a higher price-cost margin. We develop a model of intermediaries that exercise both output-market and input-market power and use it to estimate the relative contributions of markups and markdowns to the observed price-cost margins, for different quality categories.
Housing Mobility Programs (HMPs) support residential mobility to reduce economic segregation. One design feature of HMPs requires identifying areas to which moving will most improve outcomes. We show that ranking neighborhoods’ effects using current residents’ outcomes has strengths over using previous residents’ outcomes due to statistical uncertainty, bias from sorting over time, and lack of support. We simulate how the choice of neighborhood ranking and others affect an originally-intended outcome of HMPs: reducing racial segregation. HMP success on this dimension depends on the ability to port vouchers across jurisdictions, access to cars, and the range of neighborhoods targeted.
Root dominance is an intermediate dominance relation between weak and strict dominances. In addition to weak dominance, root dominance requires strict dominance on all profiles where an opponent plays a best response to the dominating strategy. The iterated elimination of root dominated strategies (IERDS) outcome refines the iterated elimination of strictly dominated strategies (IESDS) outcome, and IERDS is an order independent procedure in finite games, contrary to the iterated elimination of weakly dominated strategies (IEWDS). In addition, IERDS does not face the inconsistency that we call mutability. That is, IERDS does not alter the dominance relation between two strategies like IEWDS does. Finally, we introduce a rationality concept which corresponds to root undominated strategies. This rationality concept is induced by perturbations of the game such that a player believes that the strategies he considers might be observable by his opponent. We discuss the links between our concept and other concepts established in various literatures such as the conjectural variations theory.
Faced with increasing urbanisation and climate crisis, the development of green spaces in cities has become a major issue for urban planners. While the need for proximity between housing and green spaces has been widely established in the literature, the question of the size to allocate to the latter is important in a context of strong pressure on land use. We explore this question by taking advantage of databases of the local rent observatories for rental prices and OpenStreetMap for parks. Using a generalised propensity score weighting method, we analyse the preferences between different typologies of park sizes in the private rental market of the largest French urban areas in 2017 and 2018. We show that on average, individuals value large parks more, followed by small and lastly by medium– sized parks. We also detect variations in this hierarchy of preference depending on flat size and its location. These results are of interest not only to property investors looking to increase their rental income, but also to political decision–makers looking to improve existing parks and propose new urban park development projects.