Specialist merchants and traders---agents who mediate the transfer of goods and services between producers and consumers---are central to the economic process, but there are few theoretical models in which the institution of intermediation is an endogenous part of an equilibrium. This paper...

There is substantial experimental and empirical evidence to suggest that individual behaviour in bilateral or small-group interactions is affected by social norms. Further, social norms vary according to context. Previous research largely focuses on norms of fairness, not norms per se. We design...

We analyze a firm's job-assignment and worker-monitoring decisions when workers face occasional crises. Firms prefer to assign good workers to a difficult task and to not employ bad workers. Firms observe failures but only observe successfully resolved crises if they monitor the worker. If...

We analyze a firm's job-assignment and worker-monitoring decisions when workers face occasional crises. Firms prefer to assign good workers to a difficult task and to not employ bad workers. Firms observe failures but only observe successfully resolved crises if they monitor the worker. If...

This paper develops a dynamic model of an economy with search frictions in which homogeneous agents choose between specializing as producers or as merchants, and can change occupation at any time. Merchants operate alongside a decentralized search market and provide immediacy in trade in return...

Traders with specific characteristics operating in a pairwise exchange market may prefer to meet other traders with similar (or complimentary) characteristics, while other categories of traders may not have such preferences. The existence of the second type imposes a negative externality on the...