In many economic and social contexts, individuals can undertake a transaction only if they are `linked' or related to each other. We take the view that these links are costly, in the sense that it takes effort and resources to create and maintain them. The link formation decisions of the players...

We study competitive economies with adverse selection and fully exclusive contractual relationships. We consider economies where agents are privately informed over the probability distribution of their endowments, and trade to insure against this uncertainty. As in Prescott-Townsend (1984), we...