We study transactions that require investments before trading in a competitive market, when forward contracts fixing the transaction price are absent. We show that, despite the market being perfectly competitive and subject to arbitrarily little uncertainty, the inability to jointly determine...

We consider an exchange economy with time-inconsistent consumers whose preferences are additively separable. When these consumers trade in a sequence of markets, their time-inconsistency may introduce a non-convexity that gives them an incentive to trade lotteries. If there are many consumers,...

The conventional search and matching model has been criticized for its inability to explain large cyclical volatility in the vacancy-unemployment ratio without ad hoc assumptions of wage rigidity. This paper presents a mechanism of such volatility without assuming wage rigidity by showing that...

Humans cooperate a great deal in economic activity, but our two major models of equilibrium – Walrasian competitive in markets and Nash in games – portray us as only non-cooperative. In earlier work, I have proposed a model of cooperative decision making (Kantian optimization); here, I embed...

This paper presents sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique and globally stable steady state equilibrium for OLG economies with production. The conditions impose separate requirements on the utility and production functions. Moreover, the conditions do not require assumptions...

Many consumers care about climate change and other externalities associated with their purchases. We analyze the behavior and market effects of such "socially responsible consumers" in three parts. First, we develop a flexible theoretical framework to study competitive equilibria with rational...

We take into account that envy (relative consumption concerns) is more pronounced in the present than in the future. We consider a Ramsey-type model in which agents differ only in their initial capital endowments but are identical in their exogenous parameters. Agents' preferences exhibit...

This paper investigates the relationship between various market imperfections and the skill premium. The model in this paper assumes perfectly competitive labor markets but distorted product and financial markets. The model predicts that the skill premium is positively correlated with market...

This paper shows that a Nash equilibrium consisting of strategies of choosing a Pareto inefficient transition path is selected by households even without frictions as a result of the revealed government failure in supervision of financial markets. The Pareto inefficiency causes the generation of...

The paper examines a new possibility of output gaps in an economy without any rigidity. The driving force behind the new possibility is non-cooperative behavior of consumers. The paper shows that there is a possibility that when a fundamental shock hits an economy this non- cooperative nature...