This study explores mechanism design for networks of interpersonal relationships. Agents' social (i.e., altruistic or spiteful) preferences and private payoffs are all subject to asymmetric information; utility is (quasi-)linear, types are independent. I show that any network of at least three...

“The Problem of Social Cost” is rightly credited with helping to launch the economic analysis of law. George Stigler plays a central role in the professional receipt of Coase's work and, in particular, of the Coase theorem. While Coase's negotiation result was taken up in the scholarly...

In a full-information, zero transactions costs world, the degree of protection afforded to an entitlement does not affect the likelihood of efficient trade. In reality, imperfect information is often inevitable. Specifically, a party will usually have incomplete information about fairness norms...

Various reformulations of the Coase theorem have developed normative corollaries on the choice of optimal remedies in the presence of positive transaction costs. In this article, we consider the extent to which these propositions are affected by the presence of asymmetric transaction costs, and...

We investigate the efficiency of Coasean bargaining when restrictions are placed on the set of feasible bargaining outcomes. When property rights are costly to (defend) appropriate, we find bargaining restrictions may be Pareto superior to unconstrained voluntary exchange. Under cost uncertainty...

The Coase doctrine is usually presented as a static theorem purporting to explain the spontaneous correction of market defects by agreement between affected parties. However, as Stigler formulated it, those results are only reached under the questionable assumptions of zero transaction costs,...

This article suggests that the law of Deuteronomy 23:25, 26, which allows all people unlimited access to fields, is referring to ownerless fields that have only two possible uses, as farmland or as passageways for travelers. If the value of the land as a pathway for travelers is greater than the...