A premise of general equilibrium theory is that private goods are rival. Nevertheless, many private goods are shared, e.g., through barter, through co-ownership, or simply because one person’s consumption affects another person’s wellbeing. We analyze consumption externalities from the...

In a labor market hierarchy, promotions are affected by the noisiness of information about the candidates. I study the hypothesis that males are more risk taking than females, and its implications for rates of promotion and abilities of survivors. I define promotion hierarchies with and without...

In the theory of economies with public goods one usually considers the case in which private goods are essential, i.e., each agent receives a fixed minimum level of utility if he consumes no private goods, irrespective of the public goods consumed. This paper develops the second welfare theorem...

We present a theory of production that begins with an exogenously specified set of technologies, accessible to each potential firm. The technologies used in equilibrium are endogenous. Labor skills are differentiated, and the labor skills are acquired endogenously by workers, possibly by bearing...

In the past several years, the seed industry worldwide has been dramatically restructured, mostly through mergers and acquisitions. We argue that the restructuring has been technologically driven, and has also resulted in the transformation of several chemical conglomerates into life-sciences...