This paper analyses the formation of trading groups in a bilateral market with strategic traders. A trading structure (a partition of the set of traders into trading groups) is strongly stable if no coalition of traders can deviate and increase the utility of some of its members while making no...

This paper analyzes the formation of cartels of buyers and sellers in a simple model of trade inspired by Rubinstein and Wolinsky's (1990) bargaining model. When cartels are formed only on one side of the market, there is at most one stable cartel size. When cartels are formed sequentially on...

The authors examine how domestic violence may be used as a bargaining instrument, to extract larger dowries from a spouse's family. The phrase "dowry violence" refers not to the paid at the time of the wedding, but to additional payments demanded by the groom's family after the marriage. The...

This paper analyzes the optimal allocation of objects which arrive sequentially to agents organized in a waiting list. Applications include the assignment of social housing, deceased donor organs and daycare slots. A mechanism is a probability distribution over all priority orders which are...

Theoretical models of government formation in political science usually assume that the head of state is non-strategic. In this paper, we analyze the power of an agenda setter who chooses the order in which players are recognized to form coalitions in simple games. We characterize those sets of...