In recent years some of the nation’s largest corporations have been the object of fierce takeover battles. The effects of these battles for corporate control reach far beyond the board room. Many stand to gain or lose depending upon the outcome. Shareholders and employees, suppliers, creditors, competitors and state and local governments all have an interest in these struggles. In addition, the...

Disagreements among economists rarely breach the academy’s walls. The recent minimum-wage controversy is a significant exception. At first glance, all the sound and fury is a puzzle.1 Minimum-wage effects, at least for current U.S. magnitudes, are small potatoes.2 Of several more important policy concerns—entitlement reform, health insurance, CPI calculation, for example—none has generated anyt...

In this paper we introduce a new coalitional value in the context of TU games with an a priori system of unions, which it is called the symmetric coalitional Banzhaf value. This value satisfies the property of symmetry in the quotient game, the quotient game property, and it is a coalitional value of Banzhaf. Several characterizations are provided and two political examples illustrate the diffe...

A monopolist supplies a multi-attribute good and does not know whether the consumer makes or avoids tradeoffs between attributes. We illustrate a form of exploitation to which the tradeoff-avoiding consumer is vulnerable. (JEL: D6, D8, L1, L2)