In this paper we consider the problem of the control of access to a firm's productive asset, embedding the relevant decisionmakers into a general structure of formal authority relations. Within such an authority structure, each decision maker acts as a principal to some decision makers, while...

Xiaokai Yang's theory of economic specialization under increasing returns to scale is a formal development of the fundamental Smith-Young theorem on the extent of the market and the social division of labor. In this theory specialization and, thus, the social division of labor is firmly embedded...

A network payoff function assigns a utility to all participants in a (social) network. In this paper we discuss properties of such network payoff functions that guarantee the existence of certain types of pairwise stable networks and the convergence of certain network formation processes. In...

We consider a relational economy in which economic agents participate in three types of relational economic activities: autarkic activities; binary matching activities; and plural cooperative activities. We introduce a stability notion and characterize stable interaction structures, both in the...