Athanasiou, E., "On the Implementation of Efficient Communication Patterns in Large Economies" | WEBINAR

May 27, 2022

Title: “On the Implementation of Efficient Communication Patterns in Large Economies” 

Speaker: Assistant Professor Efthymios Athanasiou, The New Economic School, Moscow

Host:  Associate Professor Christos Genakos, Department of Economics, Athens University of Economics and Business

Time: 12.00 -13.00

WEBINAR

Attachments:  PDF of Relevant Paper 

Abstact: Agents derive benefit from communicating with each other. In order to communicate they need to have a language in common. Learning languages is costly. Our focus is on environments comprising a large number of agents. In this setting we discuss mechanisms that each satisfies three of the following requirements: Assignment Efficiency, Strategy-Proofness, Individual Rationality and Feasibility. We propose three mechanisms. Each of them, although arguably best in its class, comes short of constituting a viable policy recommendation. Nonetheless, we find that there is some room for public intervention when large economies are involved. This crucially relies either on the capacity of the planner to finance language acquisition, or on the fact that all individuals attach a positive value, even if minimal, to the possibility of communicating.