We introduce a concept of status equilibrium for local public good economies. A status equilibrium specifies one status index for each agent in an economy. These indices determine agents' cost shares in any possible jurisdiction to which the agent might belong. We provide an axiomatic...

This paper argues that, because governments are able to relax tax competition through public good differentiation, traditionally high-tax countries have continued to set taxes at a relatively high rate even as markets have become more integrated. The key assumption is that there is variation in...

Given the preferences of players and the rules governing network formation, what networks are likely to emerge and persist? And how do individuals and coalitions evaluate possible consequences of their actions in forming networks? To address these questions we introduce a model of network...

Protests take place for a variety of reasons. In this paper we focus on protests that have a well defined objective, that is in conflict with the objectives of the government. Hence the success or failure of a protest movement depends crucially on how the government responds. We assume that...

In a classic model of tax competition, we show that the level of public good provision and taxation in a decentralized equilibrium can be efficient or inefficient with either too much, or too little public good provision. The key is whether there exists a unilateral incentive to deviate from the...

Modeling club structures as bipartite networks, we formulate the problem of club formation as a game of network formation and identify those club networks that are stable if agents behave farsightedly in choosing their club memberships. Using the farsighted core as our stability notion, we show...

We make four main contributions to the theory of network formation. (1) The problem of network formation with farsighted agents can be formulated as an abstract network formation game. (2) In any farsighted network formation game the feasible set of networks contains a unique, finite, disjoint...

We provide a new proof of the non-emptiness of approximate cores of games with many players of a finite number of types. Earlier papers in the literature proceed by showing that, for games with many players, equal-treatment cores of their "balanced cover games", which are non-empty, can be...

We show that, in competition between a developed country and a developing country over environmental standards and taxes, the developing country may have a 'second-mover advantage.' In our model, firms do not unanimously prefer lower environmental-standard levels. We introduce this feature to an...

This paper provides sufficient conditions to ensure nonemptiness of approximate cores of many-player games and symmetry of approximate core payoffs (the equal treatment property). The conditions are: (a) essential superadditivity -- an option open to a group of players is to partition into...