Debraj Ray

Development Economics does precisely that in a clear, rigorous, and elegant fashion.

Development Economics

El libro del Profesor Ray es el primer texto que incorpora los nuevos avances sobre el estudio del desarrollo de los países con bajos niveles de renta, de manera clara y rigurosa, a la vez que elegante.

Economía del desarrollo

Drawing upon and extending his inaugural Lipsey Lectures, Debraj Ray looks at coalition formation from the perspective of game theory. Ray brings together developments in both cooperative and noncooperative game theory to study the analytics of coalition formation and binding agreements.

A Game-Theoretic Perspective on Coalition Formation

Dilip Mookherjee

This collection provides a complete introduction to new ways of thinking about economic development. Emphasizing economic theory, each article has been selected for its theoretical completeness, accessibility and clarity as well as its value as a contribution to the field. A thorough introductory essay summarizes the state of the field for those new to the field and explains the importance of the articles selected.

Readings in the Theory of Economic Development

Rajiv Vohra

Harsanyi (1974) criticized the von Neumann-Morgenstern notion of a stable set on the grounds that it implicitly assumes coalitions to be shortsighted in evaluating their prospects. He proposed a modification of the dominance relation to incorporate farsightedness. In doing so, however, Harsanyi retained another feature of the stable set: that a coalition S can impose any imputation as long as its restriction to S is feasible for S. This implicitly gives an objecting coalition complete power to arrange the payoffs of players elsewhere, which is clearly unsatisfactory. While this assumption is absolutely innocuous for the classical stable set, it is of crucial significance for farsighted dominance. Our proposed modification of the Harsanyi set respects "coalitional sovereignty." The resulting farsighted stable set is very different, both from that of Harsanyi or of von Neumann and Morgenstern. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a farsighted stable set containing just a single payoff allocation. This condition is weaker than assuming that the relative interior of the core is non-empty, but roughly establishes an equivalence between core allocations and the union of allocations over all singlepayoff farsighted stable sets. We state two conjectures: that farsighted stable sets exist in all transferable-utility games, and that when a single-payoff farsighted stable set exists, there are no farsighted stable sets containing multiple payoff allocations.

The Farsighted Stable Set

If you are instructor in a course that uses Development Economics and wish to have access to the end-of-chapter problems in Development Economics, please e-mail the author at debraj.ray@nyu.edu. For more information, please go to http://www.econ.nyu.edu/user/debraj. If you are a student in the course, please do not contact the author. Please request your instructor to do so. The study of development in low-income countries is attracting more attention around the world than ever before. Yet until now there has been no comprehensive text that incorporates the huge strides made in the subject over the past decade. Development Economics does precisely that in a clear, rigorous, and elegant fashion. Debraj Ray, one of the most accomplished theorists in development economics today, presents in this book a synthesis of recent and older literature in the field and raises important questions that will help to set the agenda for future research. He covers such vital subjects as theories of economic growth, economic inequality, poverty and undernutrition, population growth, trade policy, and the markets for land, labor, and credit. A common point of view underlies the treatment of these subjects: that much of the development process can be understood by studying factors that impede the efficient and equitable functioning of markets. Diverse topics such as the new growth theory, moral hazard in land contracts, information-based theories of credit markets, and the macroeconomic implications of economic inequality come under this common methodological umbrella. The book takes the position that there is no single cause for economic progress, but that a combination of factors--among them the improvement of physical and human capital, the reduction of inequality, and institutions that enable the background flow of information essential to market performance--consistently favor development. Ray supports his arguments throughout with examples from around the world. The book assumes a knowledge of only introductory economics and explains sophisticated concepts in simple, direct language, keeping the use of mathematics to a minimum. Development Economics will be the definitive textbook in this subject for years to come. It will prove useful to researchers by showing intriguing connections among a wide variety of subjects that are rarely discussed together in the same book. And it will be an important resource for policy-makers, who increasingly find themselves dealing with complex issues of growth, inequality, poverty, and social welfare.

Debraj Ray

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