We propose the concept of level r consensus as a useful property of a preference profile which considerably enhances the stability of social choice. This concept involves a weakening of unanimity, the most extreme form of consensus. It is shown that if a preference profile exhibits level r...

Consider an exchange economy with a finite number of agents, who are arbitragers, in that they try to upset allocations imagining plausible beneficial trades. Their thought process is interactive, in that agents are conscious that the others are also going through the same steps. With this...

We analyze an economy with asymmetric information and endogenize the possibilities for information transmission between members of a coalition. We then define a concept of the Core that takes into account these communication possibilities. The internal consistency of the improvements is...

We propose two generalizations of the Davis and Maschler (1965) reduced game property to economies with asymmetric information and apply them in the characterization of two solution concepts. One is Wilson's (1978) Coarse Core and the other is a subsolution of it which we call the Coarse+ Core.

In an exchange economyw ith a finite number of indivisible goods, we analyze a dynamic trading process of coalitional recontracting where agents may make mistakes with small probability. We show first that the recurrent classes of the unperturbed (mistakefree) process consist of (i) all core...

We examine the problem of measuring influence based on the information contained in the data on the communications between scholarly publications, judicial decisions, patents, web pages, and other entities. The measurement of influence is useful to address several empirical questions such as...

We study decentralized trade processes in general exchange economies and house allocation problems with and without money. Such processes are subject to persistent random shocks stemming from agents’ maximization of random utility. By imposing structure on the utility noise term —logit...

This paper examines the occurrence and fragility of information cascades in laboratory experiments. One group of low informed subjects make predictions in sequence. In a matched pairs design, another set of high informed subjects observe the decisions of the first group and make predictions....

This paper examines how the effort choices of workers within the same firm interact with each other. In contrast to the existing literature, we show that workers can affect the productivity of their co-workers based on income maximization considerations, rather than relying on behavioral...

Consumer prices in many markets are persistently dispersed both across retail outlets and over time. While the cross sectional distribution of prices is stable, individual stores change their position in the distribution over time. It is a challenge to model oligopolistic price adjustment to...