The presence of externality, indivisibility, and uncertainty destroys the market's ability to coordinate production. Entrepreneurs rise to organize production by assuming a part of the allocative role traditionally reserved exclusively to the market. Assume that there are three classes of...

A framework for economic analysis.

The narrow applicability of Blackwell's result that "more information" is desirable, lies in the fact in economic models once a signal is observed by all economic agents their opportunity sets may vary. We show that Blackwell's theorem does not hold when the feasible set of actions is...

When aggregating individual preferences through the majority rule in an n-dimensional spatial voting model, the `worst-case' scenario is a social choice configuration where no political equilibrium exists unless a super majority rate as high as 1-1/n is adopted. In this paper we assume that a...

We discuss the formation of technical standards platforms in industries with network externalities where firms are free to choose their degree of technical compatibility with competitors. In our model, firms choose affiliation to a technical standards coalition in the first stage of a game, and...

Bandyopadhyay, Dasgupta and Pattanaik [JET, 2002] have presented a construction that aggregates standard demand functions by a stochastic demand function, in such way that the latter satisfies the weak axiom of stochastic revealed preference when the former full Samuelson's weak axiom of...

The standard view that the absence of property rights is inefficient contradicts the Coasean proposition that the relative efficiency of different institutions depends on their ability to economize on transaction costs. Moreover, the comparative theory of open access and private property...

This paper explores the manner in which race and income interact to determine patterns of residential location in metropolitan areas. We use a framework in which individuals care about both the level of affluence and the racial composition of their communities, and in which there are differences...

This paper is a first look at how the information infrastructure for economists will change with the arrivial of the Internet. While paper has long been used for the the flow of information in the profession, computer networks are starting to supplement it, and in the not-to- distant future,...

Many markets have “unraveled” and experienced transactions at dispersed and apparently inefficiently early times. Often these markets develop institutions to coordinate and delay the timing of transactions. However it has proved difficult to gather data that allows the efficiency gains to be...