We model an economy with social institutions that facilitate trade and induce three types of costs: establishment costs, access costs, and use costs. Use costs are specific transaction costs related to the use of these trade institutions. We assume that a trade institution is economically...

In their seminal paper, Harrington and Hess (1996) discuss a model where candidates differ along two dimensions - ideology which is modeled by the standard Hotelling-Downs formulation and valence factors which encompass traits which all voters agree as desirable. While valence factor is given,...

A network payoff function assigns a utility to all participants in a (social) network. In this paper we discuss properties of such network payoff functions that guarantee the existence of certain types of pairwise stable networks and the convergence of certain network formation processes. In...

We consider a multimarket framework where a set of firms compete on two interrelated oligopolistic markets. Prior to competing in these markets, firms can spy on others in order to increase the quality of their product. We characterize the equilibrium espionage networks and networks that...