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协调失败在现代经济理论中的位置

Neoclassical theory and the Coase theorem  新古典理论和科斯理论

Neoclassical theory—as I use the term here – was the central economic paradigm until the mid-1970s. It studies price-mediated allocations in a setting of "complete markets." There is a market for all commodities that are, or could be, produced. The “virtual” prices ensure that every set of actions whose social benefits exceed their opportunity costs is undertaken.

    新古典理论——当我在这里使用这个术语时——指的是直到70年代中期的主流经济学派。该理论研究一个“完全市场”背景下的价格协调分配机制。存在一个市场，所有的商品都在此生产或可以生产出来。“实际”的价格确保每一个行动集合都被执行，只要它们的社会收益超过机会成本。

We were always told that such models served only as a benchmark. Neoclassical

economists recognized that their models did not take account of direct interdependencies among individuals that were not mediated through markets (e.g., Pigou's polluting factories). But by and large, they believed that these were relatively unimportant and that interdependencies that were mediated through markets (pecuniary externalities) did not have efficiency effects (for example, Mishan 1971, Cheung 1973).

我们总是被告知这样的模型仅仅作为一个基准。新古典经济学家认识到他们的模型并没有考虑到个体之间直接的相互依赖性，而这种相互依赖性并不是以市场为媒介的（如庇古的污染工厂）。但基本上，他们相信这些相对不重要并且以市场为媒介的相互依赖性对效率没有影响（如米山，1971，张，1973）[1]。

In an extension of neoclassical economics, Coase [1960] argued that when an

economy departed from the complete markets assumption of neoclassical theory, private agents would negotiate to efficient outcomes.5 In that tradition, North and Thomas (1973) in their economic history of the West (The Rise of the Western World), argued that the institutional changes in the West, 900-1700, were driven by changes in relative scarcity values of products and factors; as with competition among firms in neoclassical economics, superior institutions ultimately eliminated inferior institutions.

作为新古典经济学的延伸，科斯（1960）认为，当一个经济系统偏离新古典理论的完全市场假设时，私人主体可以通过谈判达到有效的结果[2]。在那种传统中，诺思和托马斯（1973）在他们的西部经济史（《西部世界的崛起》）中争辩说，公元900-1700年间西部的制度变迁，是由产品和要素的相对稀缺价值的变动驱动的；伴随着新古典经济学式的企业竞争，高等组织最终淘汰了低等组织。

Institutional economics outside of the “straitjacket” of neoclassical economics

新古典经济学“束缚”之外的制度经济学

Another strand of the literature, however, recognized that markets were inherently limited by problems of information and enforcement.6 There could never be the complete set of markets in goods, risks, and futures on which the efficiency results of neoclassical theory rest. Non-market institutions arise in response to limits on markets, but there need be no forces that ensure efficiency.

然而，另一股经济学流派认识到由于信息和执行的问题，市场本质上是有限的[3]。新古典理论的效率结果赖以存在的产品、风险和未来的完全市场集合从来就不存在。非市场制度的出现是对市场有限性的反应，但是不需要什么力量来保证效率。

This can be put another way. Individual actions that are privately rational when

the individual takes his environment more or less as given, need not be socially rational. There might be another set of individual actions that would create a different environment, within which a different set of actions would be an equilibrium, and that environment might be a better state of affairs. There could be multiple equilibria in institutions, with no tendency for market forces to select the one that was best.

这可以通过另一种方式来说明。当个体把环境或多或少看成既定时，个体理性的行为不需要是社会理性的。可能有另一类个体行动集合，创造了一个不同的环境，该环境下有一个不同的行动集合作为均衡，并且这个环境可能是一种更好的状态。在制度中存在多重的均衡，没有趋势使得市场可以选择最好的一个。

This can be illustrated in a simple way, following de Meza and Gould 1992. Suppose

that property rights are well-defined but that those individuals who own forested land

must incur a fixed cost (e.g., to build a fence or hire a patrol) to enforce their property

rights over the forest. Without this private expenditure, workers will be free to use the

private forests and extract income from them. The benefit to an owner from enforcing his property right is that he can hire workers to exploit his forest and collect the resource rents. Thus, in deciding whether to enforce his property rights, an owner compares his potential rents to the enforcement cost. These rents will be larger, the lower the reservation wage of workers. The reservation wage of workers, in turn, depends on how many other owners are enforcing their property rights. As the fraction of property owners who enforce their rights increases, the outside opportunities of workers fall and, thus, so does the reservation wage. With lower wages, potential resource rents rise. Two stable equilibria may therefore exist, indicated in bold in Figure 1. In the first, all owners enforce their property rights, wages are low, and rents are high. In the second, no one enforces, wages are high and potential rents low, so that it does not pay any owner to enforce his property rights.7

根据梅萨和哥拉德1992年的论文，这可以通过一种简单的方法来说明。假设产权定义良好，但是那些拥有林地的个体要执行他们对于森林的产权就必定产生一个固定成本（例如建造篱笆或者是雇佣巡逻）。如果没有这个私人支出，工人们就可以自由使用私人森林并从中获取收益。所有者执行其产权的收益是他可以雇佣工人开发他的森林并收取资源租金。因而，在决定是否执行产权时，一个所有者就会将潜在的租金收益和执行成本进行比较。工人的预留工资越低，租金就越高。工人预留工资的高低，反过来又取决于有多少其它的所有者在执行产权。随着执行产权所有者的比例增加，工人的外部机会就会减少，于是预留工资水平也会下降。于是就可能存在两个稳定的均衡，如图1的粗黑点所指示出来的那样。在第一个均衡中，全部所有者执行产权，工资水平低，租金高。在第二个均衡中，没人执行产权，工资高，潜在租金水平低，于是不能保证任何一个所有者执行他产权时可以获利[4]。

正如科斯（1937）强调的，当产权的执行成本很高时，一个市场可能是也可能不是最好的分配系统。但是就如拥护科斯传统的人通常没有意识到的那样，不论最佳分配系统是怎样的，一个分散化的经济都达不到最佳状态。

As Coase [1937] emphasized, when the enforcement of property rights is costly, a market may or may not be the best allocation system. But as those working in the Coase tradition did not, in general, recognize, whatever the best allocation system is, a

decentralized economy may not reach it.

A very general insight of recent theoretical work is that while institutions may have, as their intention, the improvement in economic outcomes, there is no assurance that that will be the case. Institutions may be part of an equilibrium, and yet be dysfunctional. For example, Arnott and Stiglitz [1991] consider the consequences of the social institutions that arise as a result of the incomplete insurance provided by markets because of moral hazard problems. They show that informal social insurance may crowd out market insurance and lower welfare. Developing countries may be caught in a vicious circle in which low levels of market development result in high levels of information imperfections, and these information imperfections themselves give rise to institutions—for example, informal, personalized networks of exchange relationships (Kranton, 1996) —that impede the development of markets. Banerjee and Newman 1997 show that an inefficient dualistic economic structure, where market forces govern economic exchange in one sector but not in another, can be explained as the consequence of a self-sustaining network. Dualism may be one equilibrium among several.

最近理论工作一个普遍观点是，虽然制度如他们的意图一样可能会对经济结果有改善作用，但不能确保这肯定会发生。制度可能是均衡的一部分，但是功能失常。例如，阿诺特和斯蒂格里茨（1991）考虑了社会制度的重要性，这些制度的出现是由于道德风险问题，市场提供的不完全保险的结果。他们指出非正式的社会保险机构可能排挤市场保险并降低了福利。发展中国家可能会陷入一个恶性循环：低水平的市场发育程度导致了高水平的信息不完全，信息不完全本身又促使那些阻碍市场发育的制度——如非正式、私人化的交易关系网络（克朗顿，1996）——的增加。Banerjee和纽曼1997年证明一个无效的二元经济结构——市场力量控制一个部门的经济交易，但另一部门不是——可以解释为一个自我持续的网络的结果。二元结构可能只是几个均衡中的一个。

现代协调失败理论的一个更深刻的启示是，任何现有制度集合的进步——“好的变化”——不可能单独进行下去，如果它们需要其它社会制度的相应变化的话（格雷夫，1997）。“如果制度矩阵奖励盗版，那么（只有）盗版的组织会出现……”（诺思，1994，p.361）。

A further implication of the modern theory of coordination failures is that improvements in any existing set of institutions—“good mutations”—may not survive on their own if they require accompanying changes in other social institutions (Greif 1997). "If the institutional matrix rewards piracy, then [only] piratical organizations will come into existence..." (North, 1994, p. 361).

History Dependence and Poverty Traps  历史依赖和贫困的陷阱

Recent historical accounts go beyond the observation that there are multiple equilibria

and show that economic outcomes exhibit history dependence. By history (or path)

dependence is meant not just the obvious fact that past events may circumscribe current choices, but that they determine and predict the decisions at all crossroads since some initial starting point. For example, after a war-time disruption of trade, an economy may undergo a structural change, develop a new system, and never return to the original one.

最近的历史资料超越了存在多重均衡的观察，表明经济产出显示出历史依赖性。历史（或是路径）依赖不仅意味着显而易见的事实即过去的事件将限制现在的选择，还意味着自某个起点开始，过去的事件确定并预知了所有十字路口的决定。例如，经过一个战时的贸易中断，经济系统就会经历一个结构变迁，发展出一个新系统，并且永远也不会返回初始状态。

The distribution of wealth in the past is one of the most important channels through which history can have potentially large, permanent effects. Here I summarize a few central ideas from this rapidly growing literature. One line of thought emphasizes political influences. Engerman and Sokoloff (1997) and Sokoloff and Engerman (2000), for example, find that the historically highly unequal distribution of wealth in the colonies of the Americas that practiced plantation agriculture had longlasting effects through the legal, educational, and political institutions that were adopted. Another line of thought, summarized in Hoff (1994, 1996) and Bardhan et al. (2000), emphasizes that with imperfect capital markets, the poor may be unable to enter into labor and land rental contracts that provide strong incentives for effort (for example, they may be sharecroppers instead of renters, and entrepreneurial activities may be foreclosed). Hence, high inequality can lock poor households into economic stagnation. Some initial distributions of wealth are associated with subsequent growth whereas for other initial wealth distributions, growth paths do not exist.8

历史财富的分配是其中一个最重要的渠道，经由此，历史可以有很大的、永久性的潜在影响。我在此总结了这个迅速成长的学派的几个中心观点。其中一种思路强调政治影响。例如，1997年恩格尔曼和索可洛甫，2000年索可洛甫和恩格尔曼就发现，经历过种植园农业的美洲殖民地，其历史上高度不平等的财富分配对其采取的法律、教育和政治制度有着长久的影响。另外一种思路，由霍夫（1994，1996）和巴德汉等人（2000）总结出来，强调由于不完全的资本市场，穷人可能没办法获得那些为努力提供强大激励的劳动和土地租约（例如，他们可能是佃农而非租种者，于是企业家行为将被抑制）。于是，高度不平等能把穷人家庭锁定在经济停滞阶段。一些初始的财富分配伴随着后来的增长，而对于另一些初始财富分配，增长的路径并不存在[5]。

History also affects outcomes by affecting beliefs. An obvious case is one where

expectations are (at least partly) adaptive: individuals expect people to behave in the

future as they have in the past. But even with fully rational expectations, history can cast a long shadow. For example, an outbreak of corruption, or the revelation that some firms in an industry passed off shoddy goods as high-quality goods, can tarnish the reputation of the whole industry and reduce the incentive of every member of the group to behave honestly in the future. Tirole (1996) explores this idea formally in a setting where the reputation of a member of the group (e.g. an employee in an organization or a firm in an industry) depends on his own past behavior and also, because his track record is observed with noise, on the group’s past behavior. The revelation that any member of the group was dishonest in the past will increase the time it takes for any given agent to establish a reputation for honesty. This will lower his incentives to be honest, and may create a vicious circle of corruption: “the new members of an organization may suffer from the from the original sin of their elders long after the latter are gone.” (p. 1).

历史也通过影响信念影响结果。有一个浅显的例子，其中预期（至少）是自适应的：个体希望人们将来像他过去那样行动。但即使有着完全理性的预期，历史还是可能投下长长的阴影。例如，一次腐败的爆发，或者发现一个产业的某些企业将赝品冒充精品，都会使整个产业的名声失去光泽，并降低群体中每一位成员在未来诚实地表现的激励。泰勒尔（1996）在一个背景下正式探讨了这个观点：群体中某个成员（如组织中的某个雇员或产业中某个企业）的名声取决于他过去的行为，同时因为他的记录是在扰动下观察的，也取决于群体的过去行为。群体中任何一位成员过去曾经不诚实的发现，都会增加任何一个给定主体建立其诚实名声的时间。这将降低他诚实的激励，并可能创造出一个腐败的恶性循环：“一个组织中的任何新成员都会因为他们的前辈的初始罪过而遭受损失，即使后者已经离开很久。”（p.1）。

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[1] It is true that in an economy with a complete set of markets, pecuniary externalities correspond only to a movement from one Pareto efficient outcome to another. Such externalities give rise to changes in distribution that “net out”: gains by agents whose prices increase are precisely offset by losses to agents who must pay higher prices. There are no efficiency consequences from the allocation effects of price changes because equilibrium prices always are equated to marginal costs and benefits. However, in economies with incomplete markets, pecuniary externalities generally do not net out. A general framework is Greenwald and Stiglitz (1986). One application of that idea (Hoff 1998) shows that in an economy where lenders cannot distinguish borrowers who differ in their probability of default, pecuniary externalities from an improvement in technology can dissipate some, all, or more than all of the gains from the technological change. This occurs if the marginal borrower produces negative expected value (getting an implicit subsidy from the lower risk , higher quality borrowers). As the technological change induces new entry of marginal borrowers, the interest rate rises to reflect the lower average borrower quality, which hurts all borrowers and leaves banks, as before, just breaking even.

[2] To be sure, Coase himself recognized that his theorem would not hold in the presence of transaction costs (McCloskey 1998). Transaction costs are important, particularly in the process of economic development.

[3] Whereas most authors are associated with one strand or the other, it is striking that North's work helped to advance both. North's early work, which one might call "North I", was in the Coasean tradition and pioneered its application to economic history. North's later work, which one might call North II, disparages the prospects for understanding economic history as a more or less inevitable movement towards more efficient institutions: “Throughout most of history, the experience of the agents and the ideologies of the actors do not combine to lead to efficient outcomes” (North 1990, p. 96; see also North 1994). I owe to North (from his comments at a conference in May 1999) the metaphor of the straitjacket.

[4] Formally, suppose each resource owner who enforces his property rights hires L workers, and the value of their output is F(L). His rents are thus F(L) – w(x)L, where w is the wage function. Wages decrease with the fraction x of resource owners who enforce their property rights, which means that rents increase with x. Let the enforcement cost be C. There are two equilibria if F(L) –w(1)L > C > F(L) – w(0).

[5] The literature on the relationship between wealth distribution and growth in economies with imperfect credit markets includes Galor and Zeira 1993, Banerjee and Newman 1993, Aghion and Bolton 1997, Piketty 1997, and Mookherjee and Ray 1998, 1999. There is also a literature on poverty traps that occur in the presence of externalities from education (Azaraidis and Drazen 1990, Ljungqvist 1993) or lack of trust (Zak and Knack, 1998).

[此贴子已经被angelboy于2008-8-19 9:28:50编辑过]

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关键词：现代经济理论 现代经济 经济理论 Institutions Neoclassical 现代 经济理论 失败 位置 协调