In economics, the standard approach to language is that talk is cheap. Here, instead, language is a social convention that affects utility. Unless language is used in its ordinary sense, it cannot help to coordinate actions because there is no way of decoding it. This points to a unique...

In this paper we study the effects of institutional constraints on stability, efficiency and network formation. More precisely, an exogenous "societal cover" consisting of a collection of possibly overlapping subsets that covers the whole set of players and such that no set in this collection is...