Nowadays many employers offer their employees the possibility of an insurance against too large losses in income when retiring or becoming disabled. This paper models the optimization problem of the employer when setting up such a so-called pension fund. not surprisingly, it turns out that the...

We consider a relational economy in which economic agents participate in three types of relational economic activities: autarkic activities; binary matching activities; and plural cooperative activities. We introduce a stability notion and characterize stable interaction structures, both in the...

We consider a network economy in which economic agents are connected within a structure of value-generating relationships. Agents are assumed to be able to participate in three types of economic activities: autarkic self-provision; binary matching interactions; and multi-person cooperative...

Cloud computing technologies have the potential to increase innovation and economic growth considerably. But many users worry that data in the cloud can be accessed by others, thereby damaging the data owner. Consequently, they do not use cloud technologies up to the efficient level. I design an...

We analyze competition among academic faculties for new researchers. The value to individual members through social interaction within the faculty depends on the average status of their fellow members. When competing for new members, existing members trade off the effect of entry on average...

By generalizing the standard solution for 2-person games into n-person cases, this paper develops a new solution concept for cooperative games: the consensus value.We characterize the consensus value as the unique function that satisfies efficiency, symmetry, the quasi dummy property and...

This paper analyzes the relations between social capital, institutions and trust.These concepts are full of ambiguity and confusion.This paper attempts to dissolve some of the confusion, by distinguishing trust and control, and analyzing institutional and relational conditions of trust.It...

In this paper we present an axiomatic analysis of several ranking methods for tournaments. We find that two of them exhibit a very good behaviour with respect to the set of properties under consideration. One of them is the maximum likelihood ranking, the most common method in statistics and...

Abstract: We study the capacity of business associations - private, formal, noncommercial organizations designed to promote the common business interests of their members - to support contract enforcement and collective action. Inspired by recent empirical literature, our theoretical framework...