The chosen projects belong to the academics Alejandro Corvalán and Juan Escobar. Its topics cover legislative apportionment and the design of mechanisms with budgetary restrictions.
A few days ago, the National Research and Development Agency (ANID) announced the results of the Fondecyt Regular 2024 contest, which aims to promote scientific-technological-based research in various areas, through the financing of research projects of excellence. and oriented to the production of knowledge.
On this occasion, two researchers from the Millennium Institute for Research on Market Imperfections and Public Policies (MIPP) managed to have their projects chosen in the Fondecyt Regular 2024 National Project Competition.
Firstly, the Director of the MIPP Millennium Institute and Industrial Engineering academic at the University of Chile, Juan Escobar, was selected for his project “Mechanism design with budget constraints”.
The project is based on the fact that when deciding who should obtain a publicly funded but scarce good (for example, social housing), authorities normally try to identify households or agents who place a high value on the good. “As economists know, the price system is an excellent mechanism for achieving Pareto-efficient allocation in these environments,” says Juan Escobar.
However, when households have heterogeneous incomes, the price system does not need to maximize the utilitarian value of the allocation, since some high-valuation, low-budget agents may not be able to pay the market equilibrium price.
Therefore, it is not clear how best to achieve utilitarian efficiency when budget constraints are important. In this project, the MIPP Director asks how scarce resources should be allocated when agents differ in both valuations and budget constraints.
The other researcher from the MIPP Milenio Institute who managed to get his project selected was Alejandro Corvalán. The Industrial Engineering academic from the University of Chile also won with his project “Legislative Apportionment Rule: Evolution and Consequences”.
“Legislative apportionment is the process that distributes the seats of a legislature among subnational units. This distribution of seats has great economic relevance, given its proven effects on the distribution of public goods in the territory,” stated Corvalán.
The project introduces a measure that allows capturing the apportionment of a legislature in a single dimension, evaluating the regional versus population level of seat allocation. This project proposes to study the causes and consequences of this legislative apportionment rule.
As the MIPP Millennium Institute we are very proud to be able to work alongside such outstanding academics and we want to congratulate them on this achievement.
Congratulations!
MIPP Chile 2024