We study how social norms and individual rationality in the process of coalition formation sustain a particular form of collective inefficiency, namely excessive entry in the joint production and exploitation of an excludable good. We term this phenomenon the `tragedy of the clubs'. We model...

In this paper we show that it is possible to manipulate market equilibria in an economy with profit maximizing agents (or agents with quasi-linear utility functions) by either destroying or withholding ones initial endowments.

We examine a simple bargaining setting, where heterogeneous buyers and sellers are repeatedly matched with each other. We begin by characterizing efficiency in such a dynamic setting, and discuss how it differs from efficiency in a centralized static setting. We then study the allocations which...

We study whether "coercive" public provision or voluntary private provision of public goods can survive when individuals who "vote with their feet" can choose between communities that differ in the way that public goods are provided. We obtain the following findings: (i) an equilibrium always...

Religious participation is much more widespread in the United States than in Europe, while Europeans tend to view sects more suspiciously than Americans. We propose an explanation for these patterns without assuming differences in preferences or market fundamentals. Religious markets may have...

All existing impossibility theorems on judgment aggregation over logically connected propositions have one of two restrictions: they either use a controversial systematicity condition or apply only to special agendas of propositions with rich logical connections. An important open question is...

It is known that majority voting among several individuals on logically interconnected propositions may generate irrational collective judgments. We generalize majority voting by considering quota rules, which accept each proposition if and only if the number of individuals accepting it exceeds...

If each member of a group assigns a certain probability to a hypothesis, what probability should the collective as a whole assign? More generally, how should individual probability functions be merged into a single collective one? I investigate this question in case that the individual...

For infinite societies, Fishburn (1970), Kirman and Sondermann (1972), and Armstrong (1980) gave a nonconstructive proof of the existence of a social welfare function satisfying Arrowfs conditions (Unanimity, Independence, and Nondictatorship). This paper improves on their results by (i) giving...

A merging function synthesizes a vector of numbers (representing measurements, scores or quantitative opinions) into a single number (representing a consensus or collective measurement, score or quantitative opinion). Assuming that all the involved numbers are drawn from a discrete set, it is...