In this note we study the centralization vs. decentralization issue for the management of a given collective activity. The aim is to characterize a class of decision rules that guarantees the stability of global cooperation (i.e centralization) against the incentive of coalitions of citizens to...

In a standard portfolio choice between a risky and a safe asset, we study the effect of imposing premia and penalties conditional on the realized return of the portfolio meeting a given threshold. We show that thresholds set at ”intermediate levels” have the effect to increase the optimal...

Smoking, like many health-related behaviors, has "social" aspects. The smoking habits of my neighbors are likely to shape my own smoking habits, due to what is known in economics as “peer effects”. These complementarities in behavior may result from emulation, joint consumption, conformism,...

We study the formation of social ties among heteogeneous agents in a model where meetings are governed by agents' directed search. The aim is to shed light on the important issue of homophily (the tendency of agents to connect with others of the same type). The essential contribution of the...

Smoking, like many health-related behaviors, has "social" aspects. The smoking habits of my neighbors are likely to shape my own smoking habits, due to what is known in economics as “peer effects.” These complementarities in behavior may result from emulation, joint consumption, conformism,...

Biases in meeting opportunities have been recently shown to play a key role for the emergence of homophily in social networks (see Currarini, Jackson and Pin 2009). The aim of this paper is to provide a "simple" micro-foundation of these biases in a model where the size and type-composition of...

This paper considers cooperative game theoretic settings in which forming coalitions can act as Stackelberg leaders. We de�fine a value function which modi�fies the gamma-value function (Hart & Kurz, 1983, Chander & Tulkens, 1997) by letting members of deviating coalitions move �first in...

This paper presents a new cooperative equilibrium for strategic form games, denoted Conjectural Cooperative Equilibrium (CCE). This concept is based on the expectation that joint deviations from any strategy profile are followed by an optimal and noncooperative reaction of non deviators. We show...

This paper presents a new cooperative equilibrium for strategic form games, denoted Conjectural Cooperative Equilibrium (CCE). This concept is based on the expectation that joint deviations from any strategy profile are followed by an optimal and noncooperative reaction of non deviators. We show...

This paper revisits a particular norm of behaviour underlying the well known model of kinked demand. We show that under some standard regularity conditions this norm of behaviour sustains the efficient outcome in all symmetric games.