This paper is concerned with decentralized models of market equilibrium in which the primary interest lies in the nature of the institutions that govern trade. There are two separate branches in this literature. In the first, the institutions that govern trade are taken to be given exogenously....

This paper describes hedonic equilibrium and shows how and why the concept has to be modified when characteristics of traders on both sides of the market are endogenous.

The recent literature on competing mechanisms has devoted a lot of effort at understanding a very complex and abstract issue. In particular, an agent's type in a competitive environment is hard to conceptualize because it depends on information the agent has about what is going on in the rest of...