In many intermediate goods markets buyers and sellers both have market power. Contracts are usually long-term and negotiated bilaterally, codifying many elements in addition to price. We model such bilateral oligopolies as a set of simultaneous Rubinstein-Ståhl bargainings between pairs of...

Rubinstein and Wolinsky (1990) study a market with one seller, two buyers, and voluntary matching. Both the competitive outcome p[subscript c] and the bilateral bargaining outcome p[subscript b] are possible in subgame perfect equilibrium. We consider two variations. First, if there is a cost...

We study a dynamic, decentralized lemons market with one-time entry and characterize its set of equilibria. Our framework offers a theory of how “frozen” markets suffering from adverse selection recover or “thaw” over time endogenously; given an initial fraction of lemons, our model...

This paper studies decentralized exchange by bilateral matching and bargaining when resale is possible. Decentralized exchange involves the risk that goods and services may be allocated inefficiently; if low valuation buyers consume while high valuation buyers do not then social welfare is...

We examine how different welfarist frameworks evaluate the social value of mortality riskreduction. These frameworks include classical, distributively unweighted cost-benefit analysis—i.e., the “value per statistical life†(VSL) approach—and three benchmark social welfare...

We are concerned with the problem of aggregating infinite utility streams and the possible adoption of consequentialist equity principles when using numerical evaluations of the streams. We find a virtually universal incompatibility between the Basu-Mitra approach (that advocates for social...

We introduce a new consistency condition for neutral social welfare functions, called hyperstability. A social welfare function a selects a complete weak order from a profile PN of linear orders over any finite set of alternatives, given N individuals. Each linear order P in PN generates a...