Conventional public choice literature suggests that interest groups have a largely malign effect upon the economy. Suggesting that interest groups are primarily established to lobby governments for rents, the public choice approach essentially rests upon normative presumptions concerning the...

This paper investigates the role that idiosyncratic uncertainty plays in shaping social preferences over the degree of labor market flexibility, in a general equilibrium model of dynamic labor demand where the productivity of firms evolves over time as a Geometric Brownian motion. A key result...

In this paper we axiomatically characterize two recursive procedures for defining a social group. The first procedure starts with the set of all individuals who are defined by everyone in the society as group members, while the starting point of the second procedure is the set of all individuals...

This paper considers the object allocation problem introduced by Shapley and Scarf (1974). We study secure implementation (Saijo, Sjöström, and Yamato, 2007), that is, double implementation in dominant strategy and Nash equilibria. We prove that (i) an individually rational solution is...

In this paper, we reexamine Eliaz's results (2002) of fault tolerant implementation on one hand and we extend theorems 1 and 2 of Doghmi and Ziad (2008 a) to bounded rationality environments, on the other. We identify weak versions of the k-no veto power condition, in conjunction with unanimity...

The burgeoning literature on the use of sanctions to support public goods provision has largely neglected the use of formal or centralized sanctions. We let subjects playing a linear public goods game vote on the parameters of a formal sanction scheme capable both of resolving and of...