Under conditions of informational asymmetry, redistributing the property rights may improve work incentives but lead to an inefficient choice of entrepreneurial risk. We present a model in which reassignment of property rights does not affect factor prices and we show that there exist...

Two basic tenets of theWalrasian model, behavior based on self-interested exogenous preferences and complete and costless contracting have recently come under critical scrutiny. First, social norms and psychological dispositions extending beyond the selfish motives of Homo economicus may have an...

This paper analyzes the dynamics of completely decentralized bilateral exchange. In such a framework, neither money nor prices as public information exist. Rather, prices represent an agent's barter strategy, and hence are private information. We call these private prices. Agents formulate trade...

When asymmetry or non-verifiability of information, or non-excludability of users, makes contracts incomplete or unenforceable, and where for these and other reasons there are impediments to efficient bargaining, we show that private contracting will not generally assign the control of assets...