Club Economies Research Articles

Research on the Construction of Cultural Parks in the Jing-Jin-Ji Region Based on Foreign Models: A Study on the Development of Ice and Snow Tourism Routes

National cultural park is an innovative initiative for the protection and development of natural and cultural heritage resources in the new era, reflecting the core strategy of cultural heritage protection and development of representative cultural resources. It is not only an important carrier for the protection of natural and cultural heritage, but also a new model for promoting the development of cultural industry. Based on their own national conditions and experiences, countries have developed distinctive national park management models, including the native recreation value orientation of the United States, the sustainable club economy of Europe, the public supremacy of private ownership of land in the United Kingdom, and the synergistic community-neighborhood development of developing countries in Asia and Africa. In view of the heritage resources brought by the Beijing Winter Olympics, this study explores the idea of ice and snow tourism routes centered on Beijing, Yanqing and Zhangjiakou, and proposes the principles of sustainable development, mutual benefit and symbiosis, and public supremacy, which is committed to constructing a development model integrating culture, tourism and ecology.

Core Equivalence in a Mixed Club Economy

Core Equivalence in a Mixed Club Economy

The Theory of Clubs and Competitive Coalitions

This review discusses research demonstrating that club economies and coalition economies with many participants and relatively small effective groups (clubs, jurisdictions, or coalitions) are competitive. Small groups are effective if all or almost all gains to collective activities can be realized by cooperation restricted to them. At this point, there are many papers in the literature demonstrating the competitiveness of club and coalition economies in a variety of contexts. To facilitate the exposition, I treat economies with quasi-linear utilities and games with side payments. The main concepts and results for this framework are discussed. Additionally, relationships are established with regard to broader models of club and coalition economies, including very recent contributions to the literature.

Efficient agglomeration of spatial clubs

We investigate here the agglomeration of spatial clubs in an efficient allocation of a club economy. The literature on agglomeration has focused largely on a primary agglomeration caused by direct attraction forces. We concentrate mainly on secondary and tertiary agglomerations caused by a primary agglomeration. Initially, scale economies in the provision of club goods (CGs) lead each CG to agglomerate in facilities of its club. This primary agglomeration causes a secondary concentration of population around these facilities, which in turn brings about a tertiary agglomeration of facilities of different clubs into centers in the midst of population concentration. The agglomeration of facilities occurs only if a secondary concentration of population takes place. We analyze in detail two specific patterns of agglomeration. One is the central location pattern in which the facilities of all clubs agglomerate perfectly in the middle of the complex. The second is a triple-centered complex in which the center in the middle of the complex consists of perfectly agglomerated facilities of different clubs, each with a single facility per complex. The remaining two centers also consist of facilities of different clubs, but clubs in these centers each have two facilities per complex, one in each center. Each of these two centers is located between a boundary and the middle of the complex closer to the middle of the complex than to the boundary. The facilities in these two centers form condensed clusters of facilities that may contain residential land in between the facilities. We then show that these agglomeration patterns also characterize agglomerations in general. The literature maintains that an efficiently behaving municipality increases its tax-base. This implies that it is in the municipality’s interest to achieve efficiency. The best way for a local government to achieve this desired efficiency is by partially intervening in market operations in order to internalize local externalities. Such an intervention should be limited to providing the city’s infrastructure, to taxing only residential land rents and clubs’ profits, to subsidizing the basic industry of the city, and to partially regulating land uses. Consequently, if the local governments of all complexes behave according to the above, the decentralization of the efficient allocation of the club economy would be attained.

PLANNING THROUGH RESIDENTIAL CLUBS: HOMEOWNERS' ASSOCIATIONS

Private homeowners’ associations now govern over 18% of the American population, enforcing contractual land-use restrictions and providing what would otherwise be municipal services. The rapid spread of these associations in new housing construction is explained by rising land costs, constraints on the ability of local governments to raise property taxes, and consumer preferences. Because these associations resemble club economies in significant respects, they provide an opportunity to test whether these private associations can provide services more efficiently than municipalities. Departures from the assumptions of the club economy model are noted, including the lack of options for consumer choice that undermine the consent-based rationale.

Firms as Clubs in Walrasian Markets with Private Information: Technical Appendix

This paper proves the Welfare Theorems and the existence of a competitive equilibrium for the club economies with private information in Prescott and Townsend (2005). The proofs cover lottery economies with a finite number of goods and without free disposal. A mapping based on Negishi (1960) is used.

Some Reflections on the Economic and Political Organisation of Private Neighbourhoods

The spreading of privately organised and often gated neighbourhoods in many regions of the world has triggered a widespread discussion about the relations between social and urban development. This paper presents some reflections on the economic and political organisation of this type of housing. First, the club goods theory is used to explain the potential attractiveness of this form of housing for developers, local governments as well as residents. However, the club goods theory alone does not enable one to understand the global but regionally differentiated development. Therefore, second, this paper proposes to view the analysis of private neighbourhoods as club economies against the background of historically and regionally differentiated patterns of urban governance which render urban development path-dependent. Third, in order to evaluate the political and social consequences, the private neighbourhoods are analysed as a new form of political organisation and are compared with a territorial organisation with public municipalities.

Lindahl equilibrium and Schweizer's open club model with semipublic goods

In this paper, we extend Schweizer's open club model to clubs with goods that have a semipublic nature rather than a pure public nature. We study limit core allocations, which are those allocations that remain in the core of a replicated economy. An equivalent notion for open clubs with pure public goods was Schweizer's concept of club efficiency under a variable number of economic agents. We show that given certain conditions, the equivalence of limit core allocations and Lindahl equilibria holds for a wide range of open club economies with semipublic club goods. We also show that extension to a more general class of open club economies seems implausible.

Price Taking Equilibrium in Club Economies with Multiple Memberships and Unbounded Club Sizes

This paper develops a model of an economy with clubs where individuals may belong to multiple clubs and where there may be ever increasing returns to club size. Clubs may be large, as large as the total agent set. The main condition required is that sufficient wealth can compensate for memberships in larger and larger clubs. Notions of price taking equilibrium and the core, both with communication costs, are introduced. These notions require that there is a small cost, called a communication cost, of deviating from a given outcome. With some additional standard sorts of assumptions on preferences, we demonstrate that, given communication costs parameterized by epsilon > 0, for all sufficiently large economies, the core is non-empty and contains states of the economy that are in the core of the replicated economy for all replications (Edgeworth states of the economy). Moreover, for any given economy, every state of the economy that is in the core for all replications of that economy can be supported as a price-taking equilibrium with communication costs. Together these two results imply that, given the communication costs, for all sufficiently large economies there exists Edgeworth states of the economy and every Edgeworth state can be supported as a price-taking equilibrium.

Private neighbourhoods as club economies and shareholder democracies

The spread of privately governed and often guarded neighbourhoods in many countries of the world has been interpreted by several authors as a manifestation of a “privatisation of public space”. However, it often remains unclear what exactly is privatised and how privatisation is carried out. The paper presents two approaches which offer some deeper insights into the socio-economic and socio-political changes which are underway with the spread of private neighbourhoods. On the one hand, the analysis of private neighbourhoods as club economies explains the economic attractiveness of this form of housing. On the other hand, the study of private settlements as a new form of territorial organisation shows that the political decisions are taken in a kind of shareholder democracy, and that social differences become institutionalised.

Clubs and the Market: Large Finite Economies

This paper builds a general equilibrium model of finite economies with exchange and club formation. Agents trade multiple private goods widely in the market, can belong to several clubs, and care about the characteristics of other club members. Because club memberships are indivisible and choices of club memberships must be coordinated across the population, the core of such an economy may be empty and equilibrium may not exist. However, for large finite club economies, an approximate core is not empty and states in this approximate core can be approximately decentralized by prices for private goods and for club memberships. The arguments use convexification tools familiar from the literature on private goods economies and a new tool, of some independent interest, that addresses the special problems created by the nature of club memberships. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D2, D5, H4.

SUSTAINABLE CLUBS UNDER VARIABLE PARTICIPATION

In this paper we examine a two-period static club economy where individuals of distinct types decide whether or not to subscribe to clubs at each period. We show that neither facility sizes nor consumption group sizes are affected by variable participation rates because all individuals agree over the benefits of club quality. Variable participation rates and identical preferences for club quality, however, require the coexistence of part-time and full-time clubs. With an example, we show that the full-time clubs of the standard multiple-visit club model may not be sustainable.

Optimal and Equilibrium Membership in Clubs in the Presence of Spillovers

This paper treats a partial equilibrium club economy in which clubs impose positive or negative externalities on one another. Both spillovers in congestable good and crowding are studied. It is shown that an increase the relative strength of the first type of spillover may result in either an increase or decrease in the optimal club size and public good levels. Spillovers in crowding, on the other hand, have a definite effect on the optimal membership and production of public good. These optimal outcomes are then compared to Nash equilibrium club size and public good provision when clubs are established by profit maximizing entrepreneurs instead of a social planner.

On price-taking equilibria in club economies with nonanonymous crowding

Competitive equilibrium in a coalition production economy or a club economy typically does not exist when there is free entry, for two reasons. First, there may be an “integer problem”, as is familiar from club theory with anonymous crowding. Second, “optimal” groups may have different compositions from the population, and then even if there is no integer problem, it may be impossible to partition the population into optimal groups. I define a notion of approximate equilibrium and show that such an equilibrium always exists in a sufficiently large economy. I focus on the optimal size of the economy rather than of clubs.

Decentralization in Replicated Club Economies with Multiple Private Goods

We show that “exhaustion of blocking opportunities” is a sufficient condition such that every allocation in the core of a replicated club economy can be decentralized as a competitive equilibrium, and that a related condition “efficient scale” is necessary and—under an assumption on endowments—sufficient such that competitive equilibrium exists and the core is nonempty. These results do not require the Euclidean structure and monotonicity assumed in Lindahl equilibrium, do not require convexity of preferences or costs, and do not require the strong assumption that private goods are “essential”.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: D46, D50, D61, H40.

The core and the hedonic core: Equivalence and comparative statics

In large cooperative games core payoffs can be decomposed as a linear function on players' attributes which we call a ‘hedonic payoff’, provided that the worth of each coalition depends only on the sum of its members' attributes and payoffs are superadditive in attributes. If two large finite games weight a particular attribute differently, then the hedonic payoff to that attribute is larger (no smaller) in the game that gives it less weight. The hedonic payoff can be interpreted as a competitive price function e.g. an anonymous wage function in coalition production economies and an anonymous system of admissions prices in club economies.

Concurrence et biens publics

I discuss the extent to which the theory of local public goods and clubs is an extension of competitive theory. To do this I reinterpret efficiency results in the literature as arising from optimization against a complete price system. For clubs I give a framework to unify club economies with anonymous and nonanonymous crowding. Competitive equilibrium is equivalent to the equal-treatment core, and core payoffs satisfy a monotonicity property: An increase in the number of one type of player will reduce their core payoff. When the partition of the population is constrained by fixed geographic boundaries, efficiency is second-best. A complete price system can be used to describe capitalization, and optimization relative to this price system leads to second-best efficiency. For both branches of the literature I offer criticisms of the price systems and equilibrium concepts.

Competitive equilibrium and the core in club economies with anonymous crowding

In club economies with anonymous crowding, competitive equilibrium states of the economy are efficient and coincide with the core when there is only one private good. Anonymous admission prices permit consumers with different tastes to share facilities. Consumers might do so when their demands for facility size and crowding coincide, in which case sharing is efficient. Thus, similarity of demands is the relevant consideration for efficiently grouping consumers with different tastes.