This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

Multiplicity of equilibria is a common problem in many economic models. In general, it is impossible to devise methods that always find all equilibria for any type of model. A notable exception are models in which all equilibria are solutions to a system of polynomial equations since there are...

Repeated interactions provide a prominent but paradoxical hypothesis for human cooperation in one-shot interactions. Intergroup competitions provide a different hypothesis that is intuitively appealing but heterodox. We show that neither mechanism reliably supports the evolution of cooperation...

The intuitive idea of two activities being complements, for example tea and lemon, is that increasing the level of one makes somehow desirable to increase the level of the other (Samuelson, 1974). Hence complementarity, in its very nature, is a sensitivity property of the set of solutions to an...

The paper investigates the stability of the International Environmental Agreement in a model of emission reduction. We consider a two stage game, in which in the first stage each country decides whether or not to join the agreement while, in the second stage, the quantity of emissions reduction...

We introduce a class of games with complementarities that has the quasisupermodular games, hence the supermodular games, as a special case. Our games retain the main property of quasisupermodular games : the Nash set is a nonemply complete lattice. We use monotonicity properties on the best...

Many economic and social situations can be represented by a digraph. Both axiomatic and iterative methods to determine the strength or power of all the nodes in a digraph have been proposed in the literature. We propose a new method, where the power of a node is determined by both the number of...

We introduce a class of games with complementarities that has the quasisupermodular games, hence the supermodular games, as a special case. Our games retain the main property of quasisupermodular games: the Nash set is a nonempty complete lattice. We use monotonicity properties on the best reply...

We study repeated prize allocation problem when the discount factors f the agents are not equal. It is shown that the feasible set of payoffs is not well behaved. In particular, it is not convex as it contains holes and caves. The Pareto frontier is everywhere discontinuous and there is an open...

We consider preference relations over information that are monotone: more information is preferred to less. We prove that, if a preference relation on information about an uncountable set of states of nature is monotone, then it is not representable by a utility function.