In this paper the behavior of producers in a social environment is considered from a more sociological point of view than is usually done in economics. The producers play Bertrand price competition against each other and change the action they played based upon the outcome of the game, according...

In this paper we generalize the concept of coalitional games by allowingfor any organizational structure within coalitions represented by a graphon the set of players ot the coalition. A, possibly empty, set of payoffvectors is assigned to any graph on every subset of players. Such a gamewill be...

Uncertainty about the future preferences of the government may induce policy makers to run excessive budget deficits. As a solution to this problem, economists have proposed to impose a binding debt rule. In this paper we argue that a binding debt rule does not eliminate the distortions due to...

Mostly infinite dimensional economies can be considered limits offinite dimensional economies, in particular when we think of time orproduct differentiation. We investigate conditions under which sequences of quasi-equilibria in finite dimensional economies converge to a quasi-equilibrium in the...

After decades of government growth, Western countries have witnessed major policy reversals. Prominent examples include the far-reaching policy reversals implemented by Thatcher, Reagan, and Douglas. This paper offers an explanation for these policy reversals. Our key argument rests on the...

A cooperative game with transferable utilities, or simply aTU-game, describes a situation in which players can obtain certainpayoffs by cooperation. A solution mapping for these games is amapping which assigns to every game a set of payoff distributionsover the players in the game. Well-known...

Collective decision procedures should balance the incentives they provide toacquire information and their capacity to aggregate private information. In a decisionproblem in which a project can be accepted or rejected once information about its qualityhas been acquired or not, we compare the...

In models of sequential decision making herd behaviour occurs if the signals smart(dumb) agents receive are (un)correlated and if agents have reputational concerns. We show thatintroducing costly effort to become informed about project payoffs (i) eliminates herdbehaviour and (ii) shifts...

Can vanity do any good? It may seem obvious to answer this question in the negative, as economists have shown how reputational concerns lead agents e.g. to ignore valuable information, to herd, and to become overly risk averse. We explore how proud agents may be a social blessing. An agent may...

This paper deals with the optimal provision of infrastructure by means of public-private partnership contracts. Inthe economic literature infrastructure is characterized as a large, indivisible and non-rival capital good thatproduces services for its users. The non-rivalness or nonexcludability...