The paper shows that the co-movements of optimal price and output in a monopolistic market can be a case of spurious correlation, price and quantity variations being affect by the degree of uncertainty in the consumers' incomes. The pattern of price and quantity changes depends on the shape of...

This paper contrasts the descriptive and normative properties of the New Keynesian general equilibrium models with those of other Keynesian paradigms, such as the neoclassical sintesi and the post Keynesian ones. We argue that the co-ordination failures, which are pivotal within the New...

We describe economic agents as formal logical systems of the first order, and then able to show that for any ordinary geometric description of an agent as a preordering over a given choice set within the set of reals, there exists a corresponding logical description in the space of the first...

The paper proposes a formalization of rational agents as first-order consistent formal systems. On this basis we build a notion of common knowledge and common rationality, among agents who are globally inconsistent with each other. An existence theorem for a formal system of common rationality...

Nominal wage adjustment is modeled as resulting from bargaining between a risk neutral …rm and a risk averse worker, in an environment where the rate of in‡ation is a random variable. Risk aversion makes for endogenous indexation arrangements, which deliver partial indexation as they exploit...

We consider the interplay between income distribution and optimal commodity taxation, linking equity issues to optimal taxes through the effect of income distribution on market demand and its price elasticity. We find conditions to conciliate the equity and efficiency tradeoff and to assess the...

In the framework of a vertically differentiated mixed duopoly, with uncovered market and costless quality choice, we study the existence of a price equilibrium when a welfare-maximizing public firm producing low quality goods competes against a profit-maximizing private firm producing high...

The paper proves the existence of a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium in a vertically differentiated duopoly with uncovered market, for a large set of symmetric and asymmetric distributions of consumers, including, among others, all logconcave distributions. The proof relies on the 'income share...

We enquiry about the effects of first and second order stochastic dominance shifts of the distribution of the consumers’ willingness to pay, within the standard model of a market with network externalities and hump-shaped demand curve. This issue is analyzed in the polar cases of perfect...