Tiebout's basic claim was that when public goods are local there is an equilibrium and every equilibrium is efficient. The literature seems fall short of verifying this conjecture: If the notion of equilibrium is too weak then equilibrium is nonempty yet some equilibria could be inefficient. On...

This paper shows nonemptiness of the core of a customs union game with a status quo equilibrium with tariffs by employing an appropriate notion of the core as in Kowalczyk and Sjöström (1994, Economica). Specifically, we find that if customs unions may have no effects on non-member countries...

Planned shopping malls usually have one or more department stores (anchor stores) and multiple specialized retail stores in each commodity category. This paper presents a model of shopping malls in which these two types of stores sell noncomplementary commodities. If anchor stores sell standard...

We analyze the core of a class of coalition formation game in which every player's payoff depends only on the members of her coalition. We first consider anonymous games and additively separable games. Neither of these strong properties guarantee the existence of a core allocation, even if...

This note shows that if commodities are tradable across jurisdictions, then it may be efficient to have heterogeneously sized jurisdictions, even if (i) consumers are identical, (ii) there is one private good and one public good, (iii) utility and production functions are not affected by...

Joint production between rival firms often entails knowledge transfers without direct compensation, leaving the question as to why more efficient firms would give their rivals such an advantage.  We find that such transfers are credible mechanisms to make the market more competitive so as to...

Much of the literature on the endogenous generation of a city employs increasing returns to scale in order to obtain agglomeration. In contrast, the model considered here focuses on the role of marketplaces or trading centers in the agglomeration of population as cities. Gains to trade in...

The paper investigates the network of bilateral free trade agreements (FTA) in the context of a network formation game with transfers. Furusawa and Konishi (2002) show that without international transfers, countries with different industrialization levels may not sign an FTA, so that the global...

In a Shapley-Shubik assignment problem with a supermodular output matrix, we consider games in which each firm makes a take-it-or-leave-it salary offer to one applicant, and a match is made only when the offer is accepted by her. We consider both one-shot and multistage games. In either game, we...