Why do money and markets crowd out co-operative relations? This paper characterises the effects of intertemporal preferences, money, and markets on players' ability to co-operate in material-payoff supergames. Players' aversion to intertemporal substitution facilitates co-operation by decreasing...

In a society composed of a ruler and its citizens: what are the determinants of the political equilibrium between these two? This paper approaches this problem as a game played between a ruler who has to decide the distribution of the aggregate income and a group of agents/citizens who have the...

We consider a game of information transmission, with one informed decision maker gathering information from one or more informed senders. Private information is (conditionally) correlated across players, and communication is cheap talk. For the one sender case, we show that correlation...

If buyers do not observe the quality of a product and production of quality is costly, market allocations can be very inefficient. Certification intermediaries are institutions that provide information about quality to buyers. The amount of information in the market determines the incentives...

Voluntary agreements with industry offer many examples of overcompliance with respect to environmental standards. Such phenomena seem to be irrational but appear less surprising considering firms' strategies are aimed to internalise environmental quality. We model the choice of the environmental...

We study mechanisms for environments in which only some of the agents are directly connected to a mechanism designer and the other agents can participate in a mechanism only through the connected agents' referrals. In such environments, the mechanism designer and agents may have different...

This paper reports results from a laboratory experiment on network formation among heterogeneous agents. The experimental design extends the Bala-Goyal (2000) model of network formation with decay and two-way flow of benefits by allowing for agents with lower linking costs or higher benefits to...

The paper considers a one-to-one matching with contracts model in the presence of price controls. This set-up contains two important streams in the matching literature, those with and those without monetary transfers, as special cases and allows for intermediate cases with some restrictions on...

The stagnation of the Italian economy over the last two decades is widely documented. During this period, the world economy has become highly integrated, and foreign outsourcing has become a standard practice for firms. While trade theory predicts benefits from the internationalization of...

This paper analyzes social group formation when agents are subject to peer effects within groups increasing human capital and instantaneous utility. When agents are heterogeneous on two dimensions, ability and social skills, and monetary payments are not feasible the model predicts segregation...