The paper examines the formation of free trade agreements (FTAs) as a network formation game. We consider a general n-country model in which countries trade differentiated industrial commodities as well as a numeraire good. Countries may be different in the size of the industrial good industry...

Increasing environmental awareness may affect the pleasure of consuming a good for which an environmental friendly substitute is available. When deciding to buy differentiated products, a compromise is sometimes made between preferred characteristics of the good and its environmental properties....

Players are assumed to rank each other as coalition partners. Two processes of coalition formation are defined and illustrated: i) Fallback (FB): Players seek coalition partners by descending lower and lower in their preference rankings until some majority coalition, all of whose members...

We analyze with an integrated assessment model of climate change the formation of interna-tional environmental agreements (IEAs) by applying the widely used concept of inter-nal & external stability and several modifications of it. We relax the assumptions of a single agreement and open...

This paper reinterprets the γ-core (Chander and Tulkens (1995, 1997)) and justifies it as well as its prediction that the efficient coalition structure is stable in terms of the coalition formation theory. It is assumed that coalitions can freely merge or break apart, are farsighted (that is,...

In the literature of psychology and economics it is frequently observed that individuals tend to imitate similar individuals. A fundamental question is whether the outcome of such imitation can be consistent with self-interested behaviour. We propose that this consistency requires the existence...

Interpret 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 characterised how large e must be,...

Ordinally single-peaked preferences are distinguished from cardinally single-peaked preferences, in which all players have a similar perception of distances in some one-dimensional ordering. While ordinal single-peakedness can lead to disconnected coalitions that have a "hole" in the ordering,...

We generalise the coalition structure core to partition function games. Our definition relies only on one crucial assumption, namely that there is some internal consistency in the game: residuals of the deviation play a game similar to the initial one, and – whenever this is possible – they...

Taking account of sinks credits as agreed in Bonn and Marrakech, this paper illustrates how market power could be exerted in the absence of the US ratification under Annex 1 trading and explores the potential implications of the non-competitive supply behavior for the international market of...