Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2610.06296

Automation, Savings, and Breakaway to a Post-Labour Economy

Omer Edhan·Ziv Hellman
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

When does automation become an economically self-sustaining process? We define \emph{automation breakaway} as the condition under which saving generated by physical capital and artificial labour is sufficient to finance continued automation. Artificial labour is labour-like in production but capital-like in accumulation, creating an income base that can support further investment. We characterise breakaway and its dynamic viability, showing that productivity and factor-income composition provide distinct financing channels. Artificial-labour accumulation strengthens the saving base supporting breakaway, while its effect on labour income changes sign with substitutability with human labour. Near full automation, aggregate labour income can contract through fewer human-filled jobs while average labour income in surviving jobs remains positive or rises. Optimal reliance on worker finance can begin to decline while it still provides a positive current net benefit.

Explore related subjects

econ.TH

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Omer Edhan, Ziv Hellman. 2026-10-05. Automation, Savings, and Breakaway to a Post-Labour Economy. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06296

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Social networks, confirmation bias and shock elections

This paper links the increasing prominence of social networks in politics to recent shock election outcomes. In our setup, agents learning on a network suffer from confirmation bias -- the tendency to ignore contrary evidence to ones own belief. Our main result is that confirmation bias slows down learning in a wide class of networks. For any network, consensus fails to emerge when confirmation bias is above a threshold. We explore the implications for elections and media markets. Confirmation bias increases the likelihood of shock elections, and encourages media organizations already at the fringe to take on even more extreme views.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2026

Reduced Forms: Feasibility, Extremality, Optimality

We study independent private values auction settings with heterogeneous bidders, revenue nonlinear in interim winning probabilities, and place no ad hoc restrictions on auctions that a seller can use. We show that feasibility of interim winning probabilities is testable along a unidimensional principal curve, constructed in closed form. We then explicitly characterize the extreme points of the feasible set and the allocations that induce them. Combining these results, we solve for the optimal auction under a natural regularity condition. The optimal auction equalizes bidders' marginal revenues along its principal curve and awards the good to the bidder whose type the curve reaches first. Revenue curvature determines whether and how low types are excluded---at the intensive margin, scaling winning probabilities down, or the extensive margin, cutting them off. Applications include the linear model, endogenous valuations from ex ante investments, and non-expected utility preferences, where previous results were largely limited to symmetric environments and allocations or two bidders.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2026

The lattice structure of the crawler

We study object reallocation problems with single-peaked preferences. On the unrestricted domain of strict preferences, top trading cycles (TTC) is the unique rule that satisfies efficiency, individual rationality, and strategy-proofness. On the single-peaked preference domain, the crawler introduced by Bade (2019) satisfies the same properties. We show that the Nash equilibrium allocations of the crawler's direct revelation game form a complete lattice under weak Pareto dominance. The truthful allocation is the greatest element of this lattice, while the initial endowment allocation is its least element.

econ.TH↗