People trade favors when doing so increases efficiency. Will they when it reduces efficiency, such as in political logrolling? We introduce the "Stakeholder Public Bad" game, in which common fund contributions increase one person’s earnings (the "Stakeholder") while reducing others'...

In this paper we argue that authorities aid cooperation by means of direct coordination or the enforcement of re-commitment devices such as contract laws.Credible threats of violence allow this role. In a local interaction model, an authority forms if mutually connected individuals with...

In this paper we argue that authorities aid cooperation by means of direct coordination or the enforcement of pre-commitment devices such as contract laws.Credible threats of violence allow this role. In a local interaction model, an authority forms if mutually connected individuals with...

In this paper we argue that authorities aid cooperation by means ofdirect coordination or the enforcement of re-commitment devices suchas contract laws.Credible threats of violence allow this role. In alocal interaction model, an authority forms if mutually connected individuals with sufficient...

We develop a model that combines competitive exchange of private commodities across endogenously formed groups with public good provision and global collective decisions. There is a tension between local and global collective decisions. In particular, we show that group formation and collective...

The paper analyzes European integration from a constitutional economics perspective. It is argued that the use of the Prisoners' Dilemma as a description of the advantages of European integration is fallacious. If the situation is a PD, the solution is impossible; if it is not, it is unnecessary.

Many economic and social situations can be represented by a digraph. Both axiomatic and iterative methods to determine the strength or power of all the nodes in a digraph have been proposed in the literature. We propose a new method, where the power of a node is determined by both the number of...

We consider cooperative games with transferable utility (TU-games), in which we allow for a social structure on the set of players. The social structure is utilized to refine the core of the game. For every coalition the relative strength of a player within that coalition is induced by the...

In the context of a changing business environment, an organization must adopte appropriate and timely decisions based on the information available in order to obtain or enhance competitive advantage. The necessity of optimal decision making by overcoming limitations of data collection, analysis...