This paper investigates the effectiveness of reputation in inducing a polluting firm to self-regulate its emissions when consumers have imperfect information. In particular, we ask to what extent must consumers reward and punish the firm before it chooses self-regulation as its dominant strategy? We find that if payoffs in the stage game are such that both the consumer and the polluting firm ha...

We study certain classes of supermodular and submodular games which are symmetric with respect to material payoffs but in which not all players seek to maximize their material payoffs. Specifically, a subset of players have negatively interdependent preferences and care not only about their own material payoffs but also about their payoffs relative to others. We identify sufficient conditions u...

Distressed firms are vulnerable to ineffi cient panic-based runs of their workers, suppliers, and customers. A policymaker may try to prevent such a run by pledging to protect the interests of these stakeholders should a firm cease to do business. However, this promise also enables the firm to demand better terms of trade from its stakeholders, which blunts the policy’s effectiveness. We show h...

A player's influence relative to a mechanism and opponents' strategies is the maximum difference his action can make in the expected value of a collective outcome. A player is :-pivotal if his influence exceeds a threshold :. We provide tight bounds on the number of pivotal players and on average influence. These bounds are uniform over all mechanisms and action profiles and are achieved at mec...

Choosing the Joneses: Endogenous Goals and Reference Standards A growing economic literature stresses the importance of relative comparisons, e.g., for savings and consumption or happiness. In this literature it is usually assumed that reference standards against which people compare themselves are exogenously given. In contrast findings from social psychology suggest that people play an active...

Consider an environment with widespread externalities, and suppose that binding agreements can be written. We study coalition formation in such a setting. Our analysis proceeds by defining on a partition function an extensive-form bargaining game. We establish the existence of a stationary subgame perfect equilibrium for such a game. Our main results are concerned with the characterization of e...

By distinguishing between producible and nonproducible public goods, we are able to propose a general equilibrium model with externalities that distinguishes between and encompasses both the Starrett [1972] and Boyd and Conley [1997] type external effects. We show that while nonconvexities remain fundamental whenever the Starrett type external effects are present, these are not caused by the ty...

Experimental evidence indicates that non-monetary considerations influence subjects’ allocation behavior. We investigate the impact of a multigeneration setup on allocation behavior. We modify the traditional dictator game by introducing 3 generations A, B and C. A takes an arbitrary share of a pie and passes the rest to B. B divides the rest of the pie between her and C. We find that this inte...

This paper studies a generalization of the consensus value (cf. Ju, Borm and Ruys (2004)) to the class of partition function form games. The concepts and axioms, related to the consensus value, are extended. This value is characterized as the unique function that satisfies efficiency, complete symmetry, the quasi-null player property and additivity. By means of the transfer property, a second c...

The source of disagreement between Pigou, the profession, and Coase in regard to the externalities is thought to be transaction cost. Coase shows that the traditional prescription for remedying externality problems can be wrong if transaction cost is positive. But Pigou did recognize that positive transaction cost played a role in creating externality problems even though the profession later f...