I study the capacity of business associations - private, formal, noncommercial organizations designed to promote the common business interests of their members - to support contract enforcement and collective action. Inspired by recent empirical literature, my theoretical framework connects the...

We study the capacity of business associations|private, formal, noncommercial organizations designed to promote the common business interests of their members|to support contract enforcement and collective action. Inspired by recent empirical literature, our theoretical framework connects the...

We model a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system as a series of incomplete intergenerational contracts. Each generation pays a pension to its parents as the price for a premortal transferral of economic property rights. The terms of this intergenerational trade are fixed in a social contract,...

I compare certification and self-regulation, two widely used quality assurance mechanisms in markets where consumers do not observe the quality of goods. Certification is a mechanism in which an external firm offers a certificate to producers who undergo a testing procedure, issues the...

From a theoretical point of view, explaining institutional stability and institutional change has remained a difficult task. The new institutional economics initially identified economic efficiency as the main driver of institutional change. In more recent times, it has been recognized that...

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...

We consider the allotment problems of homogeneous indivisible objects among agents with single-peaked and risk-averse von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility functions. We establish that the rule satisfies coalitional strategy-proofness, same-sideness, and strong symmetry if and only if it is...

We consider the problem of allocating infinitely divisible commodities among a group of agents. Especially, we focus on the case where there are several commodities to be allocated, and agents have continuous, strictly convex, and separable preferences. In this paper, we establish that the...