We study the optimal design of the rules of trade in a two-period market given that agents arrive at different times and may only trade with agents present contemporaneously. First period agents face a fixed cost of trading across periods, and their decisions of whether or not to trade in the...

For groups that must make several decisions of similar form, we define a simple and general mechanism that is designed to promote social efficiency. The mechanism links the various decisions by forcing agents to budget their representations of preferences so that the frequency of preferences...

The lobbying process has been described as an auction (see, for instance, Bernheim and Whinston). The auction rules picked are supposed to be descriptive, however they vary from author to author. An optimal auction for a government official leads to the same policy as in Bernheim and Whinston,...

We show that an asymptotic envy-freeness is a necessary condition for a form of robust approximate implementation in large economies.

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 certain classes of supermodular and submodular games which are symmetric with respect to material payoffs but in which not all players seek to maximize their material payoffs. Specifically, a subset of players have negatively interdependent preferences and care not only about their own...

This paper provides an evolutionary theory of reciprocity as an aspect of preference interdependence. It is shown that reciprocal preferences, which place negative weight on the payoffs of materialists and positive weight on the payoffs of sufficiently altruistic individuals can invade a...

We present a simple model of spatial evolution that avoids several problems that arise with more complex networks of players. We consider a world where pairs of players are matched forever. These players learn from the whole population but they are more likely to learn to strategies used by...

A standard assumption in the economic approach to individual decision making is that people have independent preferences, that is, they care only about their absolute (material) payoffs. We study equilibria of the classic common pool resource extraction and public good games when some of the...

The distributive politics literature following Weingast (1979) predicts majoritarian redistribution within countries governed by strong party systems. This prediction is tested using evidence from Canadian job creation grant programs active during the mid-1990s. Results provide strong evidence...