The purpose of this paper is to explain the role of institutions in different corporate governance arrangements. It applies the logic of trade-off amongst the marginal costs of participants in business organizations as a framework for analyzing corporate governance arrangements in different...

Dubey and Geanakoplos [2002] have developed a theory of competitive pooling, which incorporates adverse selection and signaling into general equilibrium. By recasting the Rothschild-Stiglitz model of insurance in this framework, they find that a separating equilibrium always exists and is...

While significant effort has been devoted to characterizing the role that irreversibility plays in individual agents' investment behavior, very little has been devoted to the aggregate economic implications of investment irreversibility. Yet irreversibility prevents the continual allocation of...

We present a model incorporating both social and economic components, and analyze their interaction. The notion of a social asset, an attribute that has value only because of the social institutions governing society, is introduced. In the basic model, agents match on the basis of income and...

A credit mechanism is considered that selects a unique competitive equilibrium (CE) of an exchange economy. It is shown that a price normalization calling for a fixed monetary value for the total wealth in the economy and the addition of appropriate default penalties together result in a...

When do firms expand abroad? Theory to date suggests that global expansion happens when firm-specific competitive advantages outweigh country-specific difficulties in operating abroad. Differences in culture, in legislation, in administrative practices, and in the overall institutional...

The use of equilibrium models in economics springs from the desire for parsimonious models of economic phenomena that take human reasoning into account. This approach has been the cornerstone of modern economic theory. We explain why this is so, extolling the virtues of equilibrium theory; then...