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...

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,...

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...

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...

This paper establishes sufficient conditions for the existence of a stable coalition structure in the "coalition unanimity" game of coalition formation, first defined by Hart and Kurz (1983) and more recently studied by Yi (1997, 2000). Our conditions are defined on the strategic form game used...

This paper proposes a formulation of coalitional payoff possibilities in games with externalities, based on the assumption that forming coalitions can exploit a "first mover advantage". We derive a characteristic function and show that when outside players play their best response...

Many Social Interactions display either or both of the following well documented phenomena. People tend to interact with similar others (homophily). And they tend to treat others more favorably if they are perceived to share the same identity (in-group bias). While both phenomena involve some...

Many Social Interactions display either or both of the following well documented phenomena. People tend to interact with similar others (homophily). And they tend to treat others more favorably if they are perceived to share the same identity (in-group bias). While both phenomena involve some...

This paper establishes sufficient conditions for the existence of a stable coalition structure in the coalition unanimity game of coalition formation, first defined by Hart and Kurz (1983) and more recently studied by Yi (1997, 2000). Our conditions are defined on the strategic form game used to...