Two of our faculty members, Alberto Salvo and Satoru Takahashi, have recently won best paper awards.

Alberto Salvo's article, "Local Pollution as a Determinant of Residential Electricity Demand" won the 2020 Best Paper Award at the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economics.  Professor Salvo joined the Department in 2013 and is an expert on environmental economics. 

The study examines utility meter readings of 130,000 households in Singapore from 2012 to 2015. A household's energy consumption over time was compared with a contemporaneous measure of air pollution (such as haze caused by forest fires in neighbouring countries).  Analysis of the data showed that household electricity usage was considerably higher whenever air pollution deteriorated because more people chose to stay at home rather than go out and also because there was greater use of air-conditioners and air purifiers.  These defensive behaviours generate a vicious cycle whereby actions made in response to environmental damage create further damage through additional greenhouse gas emissions from electricity supply.  The study also found that the response was not uniform across all households: poorer households were less able to afford measures to protect themselves against air pollution, and therefore run a greater risk of suffering its health consequences. The selection committee commended the paper for its excellent data and analysis and for linking the literature on environment economics and environmental justice with the literature on energy economics.

 

Satoru Takahashi's article, "Non-equivalence between all and canonical elaborations" won the 2020 Best Paper Award at the Japanese Economic Review, the official publication of the Japanese Economic Association. Professor Takahashi has been with the Department since 2012 and currently serves as the Department Head.

His prize-winning article is related to a well-known example in game theory called the 'email game' (formulated by Ariel Rubinstein in the 1980s) which demonstrates that a seemingly small amount of asymmetric information among players in a game may amplify itself through strategic interaction and end up with a large impact on players’ equilibrium behavior. Since then, game theorists have advanced their understanding of incomplete-information games such as the email game, but it mostly remains an open question which equilibrium in which game is affected by what kind of incomplete-information perturbations. Professor Takahashi's paper constructs a game that has a set of equilibria that remains unchanged under some class of incomplete-information perturbations (called 'canonical elaborations') but breaks down under another, slightly larger, class of incomplete-information perturbations (called 'elaborations'). This is the first example in the literature to demonstrate that such a distinction exists and it contributes to an improved understanding of how a game's equilibria are sensitive to the information held by players.

 

JQ, June 21, 2021