A 2law of scarcity2 is that scarceness is rewarded. We demonstrate laws of scarcity for cores and approximate cores of games. Furthermore, we demonstrate conditions under which all payoffs in the core of any game in a parametized collection have an equal treatment property and show that equal...

We define a concept of status equilibrium for local public good economies. A status equilibrium specifies one status index for each agent in an economy. These indices determine agents' cost shares in any possible jurisdiction. We provide an axiomatic characterization of status equilibrium using...

Intepret a set of players all playing the same pure strategy and all with similar attributes as a society. Is it consistent with self interested behaviour for a population to organise itself into a relatively small number of societies? In a companion paper we characterized how large " must be,...

This paper shows how competition among governments for mobile firms can bring about excessive differentiation in levels of taxation and public good provision. Hotelling’s Principle of Minimum Differentiation is applied in the context of tax competition and shown to be invalid. Instead, when an...

This paper argues that, because governments are able to relax tax competition through public good differentiation, traditionally high-tax countries have continued to set taxes at a relatively high rate even as markets have become more integrated. The key assumption is that firms vary in the...

We make two main contributions to the theory of economic and social network formation. First, we introduce the notion of a network formation network or a supernetwork. Supernetworks provide a framework in which we can formally define and analyze farsightedness in network formation. Second, we...

Kalai (2002) demonstrates that in semi anonymous Bayesian games with sufficiently many players any Bayesian equilibrium is approximately ex-post Nash. In this paper we demonstrate that the existence of an approximate expost Nash property implies a purification result of the standard sort for the...

In the literature of psychology and economics it is frequently observed that individuals tend to conform in their behavior to the behavior of similar individuals. A fundamental question is whether the outcome of such behavior can be consistent with self-interest. We propose that this consistency...

We show that, in a setting where tax competition promotes efficiency, variation in the extent to which firms can use public goods to reduce costs brings about a reduction in the intensity of tax competition. This in turn brings about a loss of efficiency. In this environment, a `minimum tax'...