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 examine the incentives of regions in a country to unite or to separate. We find that smaller regions have greater incentives to unite, relative to larger regions. We show, however, that on the whole, majority voting on separation and union generates excessive incentives to separate. This...