sequential formation of coalitions in games with externalities and fixed payoff division this paper analyzes a sequential game of coalition formation when the division of the coalitional surplus is fixed and the payoffs are defined relative to the whole coalition structure gains from cooperation are represented by a valuation which maps coalition structures into payoff vectors i show that any core stable coalition structure can be attained as a stationary perfect equilibrium of the game if stationary perfect equilibria may fail to exist in general games a simple condition is provided under which they exist in symmetric games furthermore symmetric stationary perfect equilibria of symmetric games generate a coalition structure which is generically unique up to a permutation of the players a general method for the characterization of equilibria in symmetric games is proposed and applied to the formation of cartels in oligopolies and coalitions in symmetric majority games journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c78 c71 1996 academic press inc

dynamic group formation in the repeated prisonerʼs dilemma abstract we consider dynamic group formation in repeated n person prisoner s dilemma agreements in coalitional bargaining are self binding in that they are supported as subgame perfect equilibria of repeated games individuals are allowed to renegotiate the cooperating group agreement through a process of voluntary participation we prove that a cooperating group forms as an absorbing state of a markov perfect equilibrium after a finite number of renegotiations if and only if the group is pareto efficient provided that individuals are patient the cooperating group can only expand

endogenous structures of association in oligopolies the formulation of associations of firms in an oligopoly with linear demand is analyzed as a two stage noncooperative game in the first stage firms form associations in order to decrease their costs and in the second stage they compete on the market examples of associations include r d joint ventures and groups of firms adopting common standards in equilibrium the associations formed exhibit two general features they are asymmetric and inefficient

dynamic processes of social and economic interactions on the persistence of inefficiencies an economy with a finite number of agents and a finite number of states is considered an exogenous institutional rule prescribes which moves from one state to another are feasible to each coalition at each time an agent is called to act with some exogenous probability and he chooses a coalition a feasible new state to move the economy to and side payments between the agents in the coalition the setup can be applied to various dynamic processes of social and economic interactions such as legislative bargaining coalition formation or exchange economies whenever agents are unable to write long term contracts but are otherwise unconstrained both in their ability to write arbitrary spot contracts and in their ability to collude there can be long run inefficiencies with cycles or inefficient steady states however when agents are sufficiently patient the initial state from which the process starts plays no role in the long run moreover when there exists an efficient state that is free of negat

a theory of endogenous coalition structures consider an environment with widespread externalities and suppose that bind ing 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 equilib rium coalition structures we develop an algorithm that generates under certain conditions an equilibrium coalition structure our characterization results are especially sharp for symmetric partition functions in particular we provide a uniqueness theorem and apply our results to a cournot oligopoly journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c72 c78 d62 q 1999 academic press

farsighted coalitional stability abstract i define the largest consistent set a solution concept which applies to situations in which coalitions freely form but cannot make binding contracts act publicly and are fully farsighted in that a coalition considers the possibility that once it acts another coalition might react a third coalition might in turn react and so on without limit i establish weak nonemptiness conditions and apply it to strategic and coalitional form games and majority rule voting i argue that it improves on the von neumann morgenstern stable set as it is usually defined but is consistent with a generalization of the stable set as in the theory of social situations journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c71

farsighted stability in patent licensing an abstract game approach abstract this paper analyzes the negotiations made by an external patent holder and potential licensee firms in a new model of patent licensing assuming that they are all farsighted and characterizes the symmetric farsighted stable sets given a net profit of each licensee firm a set of outcomes is a symmetric farsighted stable set if and only if at any outcome in the set each licensee firm receives the net profit and the number of licensee firms maximizes the patent holder s profit provided that licensee firms obtain the net profits we also show the close relationship between the symmetric farsighted stable sets and the relative interior of the core further we confirm that the symmetric farsighted stable sets are the absolutely maximal farsighted stable sets ray and vohra forthcoming as well as the history dependent strongly rational expectation farsighted stable sets dutta and vartiainen forthcoming

european environmental taxes and charges recent experience issues and trends abstract the use of environmental taxes and charges in oecd countries increased by over 50 between 1987 and 1994 while revenues raised by environmental taxes and charges remain small relative to overall taxation they comprise a rising proportion in most european countries several european countries have either undertaken or are considering systematic shifts in taxes away from labour and onto the use of environmental resources potential negative effects on competitiveness and regressive distributional effects are the major cause of concern with regard to the introduction of environmental taxes a number of ways of mitigating such effects exist and have been implemented

mistakes in cooperation the stochastic stability of edgeworth s recontracting in an exchange economywith a finite number of indivisible goods we analyze a dynamic trading process of coalitional recontracting where agents may make mistakes with small probability we show first that the recurrent classes of the unperturbed mistake free process consist of i all core allocations as absorbing states and ii cycles of non core allocations next we introduce a perturbed process where the resistance of each transition is a function of the number of agents that make mistakes do not improve in the transition and of the seriousness of each mistake if preferences are always strict we show that the unique stochasticallystable state of the perturbed process is the walrasian allocation in economies with indifferences non core cycles are sometimes stochastically stable while some core allocations are not

equilibrium binding agreements abstract we study equilibrium binding agreements the coalition structures that form under such agreements and the efficiency of the outcomes that result we analyze such agreements in a context where the payoff to each player depends on the actions of all other players thus a game in strategic form is a natural starting point unlike the device of a characteristic function explicit attention is paid to the behavior of the complementary set of players when a coalition blocks a proposed agreement a solution concept and its applications are discussed journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c71

structural adjustment and manufacturing sector competitiveness lessons from post unification east germany abstract the article analyzes how the particular combination of historical circumstances government policies and institutional structures have shaped the quest for competitiveness of the east german manufacturing sector after unification in 1990 the nature of unification precluded the option of achieving short run competitiveness via declining real wages leaving rapid productivity growth as the only possible avenue to pursue the east german experience underlines the importance of crowding in particularly in the context of adverse initial conditions it suggests that large scale investment does not necessarily bring with it a commensurate build up of research and development with positive spill over effects for growth it also cautions against the blind adoption of institutional arrangements from a different political economical context especially regarding capital labor relations

the dynamic study on firm s environmental behavior and influencing factors an adaptive agent based modeling approach employing an adaptive agent based modeling approach the present study explored the evolvement of firms environmental behavior and influencing factors using empirical data from 167 firms in china the simulation results revealed that firms environmental behavior followed this evolvement path defensive behavior preventive behavior and enthusiastic behavior computational experiments indicated that with increased financial ability and level of environmental preparedness the number of firms in all three categories of environmental behavior increased and so did their profits with increased public pressure the number of firms with defensive environmental behavior and their profits decreased but the number of firms with preventive and enthusiastic environmental behavior and their profits increased on the other hand when managers education level increased the number of firms with defensive behavior deceased but their profits increased slightly though the number of firms with preventive and enthusiastic behavior and their profits increased sharply in addition with the increased regulation level the number of firms with a different category of environmental behavior and their profits decreased finally with increased financial subsidy and market share the number of firms with different behavior and their profits were modified slightly

a consistent bargaining set abstract both the core and the bargaining set fail to satisfy a natural requirement of consistency in excluding imputations to which there exist objections the core does not assess the credibility of such objections the bargaining set goes a step further only objections which have no counterobjections are considered justified however the credibility of counterobjections is not similarly assessed we formulate a notion of a consistent bargaining set in which each objection in a chain of objections is tested in precisely the same way as its predecessor various properties of the consistent bargaining set are also analyzed

a model of agreements in strategic form games abstract because in a strategic form game all the possibilities of communication available to the players must be explicitly listed in the strategy spaces coalitions and coalitional behaviour are not very often taken into account in noncooperative games however it may be desirable especially in applications to separate the basic strategic features of a situation from those strategic features added as a consequence of the possibility of coalitional behaviour we define an equilibrium for the bargaining procedure called by greenberg the theory of solid situations an alternative game theoretic approach cambridge university press cambridge uk 1990 coalitional contingent threat situation we argue that the crucial problem of expectations on the counterdeviations following a deviation can be addressed by defining coalitional strategies and studying the equilibrium of the extended game journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c70 c71

the back scratching game we develop a new experiment to study the emergence of welfare reducing bilateral alliances within larger groups and the effectiveness of institutional interventions to curtail back scratching in each of the 25 rounds of our experiments a player the allocator nominates one of three others in a group as a co worker the receiver which determines the group production that period to be the productivity of the receiver which varies by round but also gives the receiver a bonus and makes them the allocator in the next round alliances then form if two individuals keep choosing each other even when their productivities are lower than that of others causing efficiency losses we study whether particular interventions reduce the rate of alliance formation random allocator rotation policies were found to be ineffective whether implemented prior to or following a baseline treatment low bonuses did significantly reduce the advent of alliances there hence seems to be some hope in preventing back scratching via reducing the gain that can be made by alliances

limited farsightedness in network formation pairwise stability jackson and wolinsky 1996 is the standard stability concept in network formation it assumes myopic behavior of the agents in the sense that they do not forecast how others might react to their actions assuming that agents are perfectly farsighted related stability concepts have been proposed we design a simple network formation experiment to test these extreme theories but find evidence against both of them the subjects are consistent with an intermediate rule of behavior which we interpret as a form of limited farsightedness on aggregate the selection among multiple pairwise stable networks and the performance of farsighted stability crucially depends on the level of farsightedness needed to sustain them and not on efficiency or cooperative considerations individual behavior analysis corroborates this interpretation and suggests in general a low level of farsightedness around two steps on the part of the agents

the coalitional nash bargaining solution the coalitional nash bargaining solution is defined to be the core allocation for which the product of players payoffs is maximal we consider a non cooperative model with discounting in which one team may form and every player is randomly selected to make a proposal in every period the grand team consisting of all players generates the largest surplus but a smaller team may form we show that as players get more patient if an efficient and stationary equilibrium exists it must deliver payoffs that correspond to the coalitional nash bargaining solution we also characterize when an efficient and stationary equilibrium exists which requires conditions that go beyond the nonemptiness of the core

coalition formation as a dynamic process abstract we study coalition formation as an ongoing dynamic process with payoffs generated as coalitions form disintegrate or regroup a process of coalition formation pcf is an equilibrium if a coalitional move to some other state can be justified by the expectation of higher future value compared to inaction this future value in turn is endogenous it depends on coalitional movements at each node we study existence of equilibrium pcfs we connect deterministic equilibrium pcfs with unique absorbing state to the core and equilibrium pcfs with multiple absorbing states to the largest consistent set in addition we study cyclical as well as stochastic equilibrium pcfs

why do firms engage in environmental management an empirical study in china abstract there are increasing pressures being put on firms from a number of different sources such as governmental regulation community participation and market demand to engage firms in environmental initiatives these factors play different roles at various development periods government regulation was the major pressure initially however community participation and market demand have become more and more important thus a better understanding of the determinant factors that play a role in engaging firms to take environmental management initiatives may help policy makers develop more effective environmental policies using data collected from 89 firms in wujin county of jiangsu province china this paper developed an index system to evaluate the corporate environmental management performance furthermore we used econometric methodology to identify the main factors that probably shape corporate environmental management performance including both external pressures and firm characteristics the results showed that pressures from supply chain customers and communities played positive roles in engaging firms to improve environmental management performance however the pressure from the regulatory system did not implicate positive effect on environmental management performance when basic compliance is not an issue in the region anymore the results also showed that firms with larger scale will be more active in engaging in environmental management initiatives finally our results suggest that a regulation s stimulation may be reduced as long as firms have complied with requirements of local environmental standards and other environmental laws b policy makers should pay more attention to market and information instruments c more financial and technical support should be provided to encourage small and medium sized enterprises smes to improve environmental performance

general wisdom concerning the factors affecting the adoption of cleaner technologies a survey 1990 2007 abstract cleaner technologies ct have recently received much attention in diverse media and policy agendas this comes out of the clear role they play in environmental protection and sustainability and the large potential to contribute to economic growth and competitiveness the realization of both potentials depends on the level diffusion and exploitation achieved today very low this article presents a selective survey of papers that today represent the general wisdom concerning the factors affecting adoption as a primary condition to diffusion and exploitation of ct the paper helps to clarify the challenges facing diffusion modelers and policy makers when dealing with policy design assessing the levels of diffusion achieved as well as the factors affecting diffusion of a particular technology the paper ends outlining further research need in the field

dynamic coalition reformation for adaptive demand and capacity sharing abstract to deal with volatile product demand and rapidly changing manufacturing technologies for sustainable returns selective collaboration among companies in supply networks sns is required recently demand and capacity sharing among independent and non competitive manufacturers at the same horizontal layer in sns has been studied through an appropriate coalition for collaborative demand and capacity sharing manufacturers can minimize their lost sales as well as maximize production capacity utilization against lumpy real demand in a previous study we have developed the collaborative demand and capacity sharing cdcs protocol which addresses a long term profitable and well balanced collaboration for each manufacturer through distributed decision making however the uncertainty of circumstances calls for an effective and timely reformation of coalitions in reality there is a trade off between frequent accommodation to changeable environments and high additional costs incurred by reformation hence in this paper we design the adaptive cdcs protocol based on dynamic contract mechanism in each period our protocol suggests whether to reform existing coalitions or not based on theoretical analyses of long term expected net profit to evaluate its performance a numerical experiment is conducted by comparing three models no collaboration static collaboration and dynamic collaboration by adaptive cdcs protocol dynamic collaboration results in more profits and its balanced redistribution by accommodating with changeable conditions

endogenous formation of coalitions the formation of coalitions is a fundamental problem in game theory by a coalition is meant a group of players e g economic or political agents which decide to act together as one unit relative to the rest of the players this includes the instances of syndicates unions cartels blocks political parties parliamentary coalitions etc we would like to emphasize that forming a coalition does not eliminate the individual players as decision makers in all interactions with the other players coalition members act as one unit it may be useful to think of a representative agent taking their place 2 however this arrangement will continue only as long as each player finds it desirable to act this way further bargaining occurs among the members of each coalition on how to divide what they obtained together thus the existence of coalitions implies that the interactions among the players will be conducted on two levels first among the coalitions and second within each coalition most of the existing models in economics and game theory assume that the coalition structure is given exogenously instead we try here to obtain it as an endogenous outcome of our model namely we want to be able to predict which coalitions will in fact form in each given situation 3 our theory combines two kinds of game theoretic concepts value and stability the basic idea is first to evaluate the players prospects in the various coalition structures and then based on these values to find which ones are stable we will call this value coalition structure value or cs value for short the reason we are considering coalition structures i e partitions of the set of players into disjoint coalitions rather than just coalitions is that in general players may find it to their advantage to join forces in some situations and to act separately in others all depending on the way the other participants are organized this implies that both the value and the stability concepts should depend on the entire coalition structure the cs value we analyze in this paper was first developed by owen 7

conflict leads to cooperation in demand bargaining abstract we consider a multilateral nash demand game in which short sighted players come to the bargaining table with requests for both coalition partners and the potentially generated resource we prove that the resulting process converges with probability one to a state in which all players agree on a strictly self enforcing division of resources i e a strict core allocation highlighting group dynamics we show how the myopic actions of players may lead to the break up of groups in the short run but can ultimately bring about a situation from which a strictly self enforcing allocation can be reached

industrial long term agreements on energy efficiency in the netherlands a critical assessment of the monitoring methodologies and quantitative results abstract long term agreements ltas with industry were added to the mix of energy policy instruments in the netherlands at the beginning of the 1990s within a few years these agreements have become very important for the industrial energy conservation policy in this study we assessed the extent to which the targets set out by the government were achieved to this end we studied 1 whether the original policy targets for industry were adequately translated to the contracted ltas 2 whether the ltas achieved the contracted goals and 3 whether the monitoring methodologies that were developed ensure a complete comparable and objective monitoring of the energy intensity developments in manufacturing industry the policy target for manufacturing industry was to decrease energy intensity by 19 in the period 1989 2000 excluding feedstocks it turned out to be possible to contract ltas that cover 72 75 of the energy consumption in manufacturing industry the average of the contracted lta targets amounts to an 18 intensity decrease the average goal achievement of the ltas in the period 1989 1997 turned out to be in accordance with the contracted targets although more than half of the lta sectors are lagging behind the agreed rate of intensity decrease for each of the ltas a monitoring methodology was developed some aspects of these monitoring methodologies have resulted in the fact that the lta monitoring does not ensure a comparable and objective monitoring of the energy intensity results in the ltas overall we conclude that the monitoring of the energy intensity developments in the long term agreements sectors is insufficiently transparent we recommend a stricter enforcement of uniform monitoring requirements in a new generation of ltas and independent supervision and verification of the monitoring results

impact of corruption in public sector on environmental quality implications for sustainability in brics and next 11 countries abstract this study investigates the impact of corruption in public sector on carbon emissions in presence of energy use segregation following the environmental kuznets curve ekc framework the study has been carried out for brazil russia india china south africa brics and next 11 countries over the period of 1990 2017 along with the finding of inverted n shaped ekc for both the cases we find that incidents of corruption enhance environmental degradation by reducing the positive impact of renewable energy consumption on environmental quality and increasing the negative impact of fossil fuel consumption this study has also divulged that the corruptive practices are more prone in case of the countries where the development is mature and institutionalization is more stringent based on these findings we suggest that environmental policies should take account of the corruption and thereby making the policies more robust and effective

stable farsighted coalitions in competitive markets in this paper we study dynamic alliance formation among agents in competitive markets we look at n agents selling substitutable products competing in a market in this setting we examine models with deterministic and stochastic demand and we use a two stage approach in stage 1 agents form alliances coalitions and in stage 2 coalitions make decisions price and inventory and compete against one another to analyze the stability of coalition structures in stage 1 we use two notions from cooperative games the largest consistent set lcs and the equilibrium process of coalition formation epcf which allow players to be farsighted thus in forming alliances players consider two key phenomena first players trade off the size of the total profit of the system versus their allocation of this total pie and second they weigh the possibility that an immediate beneficial defection can trigger further counter defections that in the end may prove to be worse than the status quo in particular one such example is that of the grand coalition which we show to be stable in the farsighted sense even though players benefit myopically by defecting from it we also provide conditions under which a situation of a few lone players competing against a large coalition is stable we examine the impact of the size of the market n the degree of competition the effect of cost parameters and the variability of the demand process on the prices inventory levels and structure of the market we discuss the possible strategic implications of our results to firms in a competitive market and for new entrants

the dynamics of coalition formation a multilateral bargaining experiment with free timing of moves abstract we experimentally investigate behavior in a finitely repeated coalition formation game played in continuous time subjects interact in groups of three bargaining over the distribution of payments which occur at regular time intervals during a given interval payments occur if and only if a majority is in agreement about their allocation aside from these rules we purposefully impose little structure on the bargaining process we investigate the frequency and stability of different types of agreements as well as transitions between them two thirds of payments involve divisions where one player receives nothing almost half of which are equal splits of the entire surplus between two players the most stable division is the three way equal split transitions between agreements are frequent and are generally consistent with myopic payoff maximization in the sense that subjects do not accept short term losses we also find that transitions between coalitions are not markovian in particular players more often forgo short term gains in order to remain in a coalition if it has proven stable in the past

consumers industrialists and the political economy of green taxation co2 taxation in oecd abstract economists have traditionally suggested that politicians should simply impose a uniform tax on harmful emissions as the first best solution prescribes however a detailed analysis of the actual design of green taxes in the oecd reveals that they are differentiated and far from this first best optimal design public choice theory suggests that an important reason that industry as a group in contrast to households is capable of lobbying against green taxation the paper presents empirical findings on co2 taxation within the oecd countries which confirm this theoretical prediction taxes are not uniform and households pay a tax rate which is six times higher than that paid by the industry on average even when tax revenue is fully refunded to industry the potential losers energy intensive firms will lobby harder against it than the potential winners labor intensive firms due to small group advantages the norwegian case confirms these arguments finally it is suggested that a co2 tax may perhaps successfully be applied to households because they tend to be badly organized as such a mix of green taxes in relation to non organized interests and grandfathered permit markets in relation to organized interests should be considered in the search for cost effective and politically feasible instruments

confining the coase theorem contracting ownership and free riding if individuals own the right to take any action that they please and are free to contract about behaviour will outcomes be efficient in all situations that is does the coase theorem hold we study this classic question through the lens of a non cooperative model of contract negotiations considering both compulsory and voluntary participation in negotiations in either case we find that all consistent equilibria of the contracting game are efficient in the case of two players but if participation is voluntary and there are more than two players there are situations in which all consistent equilibria are inefficient specifically the provision of public goods tends to be inefficiently low due to strategic abstention from contracting free riding on others agreements can be avoided if individuals do not own all their actions when actions involve the use of assets efficient action ownership may correspond to collective rather than individual asset ownership

policies influencing cleaner production the role of prices and regulation abstract low prices of inputs low costs associated with non product outputs and poor regulatory forcing have often not been conducive to diffusion of cleaner production however developments may be noted in the field of taxation subsidies liability and permits that tend to be more favourable to cleaner production extension thereof may favour cleaner production more in the future cleaner production stands to gain much by slashing subsidies and substantial ecotaxation of inputs and non product outputs similarly the regulatory enforcement of best available technologies liability for waste and tradable permits may help the diffusion of cleaner production

a regulatory framework for a policy of sustainability lessons from the neo liberal school abstract in this paper targets institutions and policy measures for describing and implementing sustainable development are evaluated in terms of their conformity with the economic framework of a market system from the viewpoint of neo liberal economic thinking as conceived by the german freiburg school of economists a general set of criteria is developed it includes issues of operationalization and legitimation of goals as well as institutional and instrumental issues on this basis general rules for designing an ecological framework guaranteeing the greatest possible degree of conformity with a market system are derived the concrete application of these rules leads to recommendations for a policy of sustainability with respect to the setting of goals the establishment of institutions as well as the use of appropriate instruments

coalitional stochastic stability abstract this paper takes the idea of coalitional behavior groups of people occasionally acting together to their mutual benefit and incorporates it into the framework of evolutionary game theory that underpins the social learning literature an equilibrium selection criterion is defined which we call coalitional stochastic stability css this differs from existing work on stochastic stability in that profitable coalitional deviations are given greater importance than unprofitable single player deviations a general characterization of css is given together with more detailed characterizations for specific classes of games applications include contracting asymmetric social norms and collusive price setting the latter of which is shown in some circumstances to facilitate competitive outcomes

a strategic model of social and economic networks we study the stability and efficiency of social and economic networks when self interested individuals can form or sever links first for two stylized models we characterize the stable and efficient networks there does not always exist a stable network that is efficient next we show that this tension persists generally to assure that there exists a stable network that is efficient one is forced to allocate resources to nodes that are not responsible for any of the production we characterize one such allocation rule the equal split rule and another rule that arises naturally from bargaining of the players

chinese companies awareness and perceptions of the emissions trading scheme ets evidence from a national survey in china abstract china announced the launch of a national emissions trading scheme ets in 2017 however companies appear show little enthusiasm for participation in the ets in china this paper identifies the factors affecting companies awareness and perceptions of ets by conducting a national survey based on an online questionnaire from may to november 2015 in seven carbon trading pilots the results indicate that companies attitudes towards the ets are positively influenced by government regulations and policy public relations management and estimated economic benefit of these public relations management is the decisive factor and estimated economic benefit is confirmed to be a relatively weak predictor a company s environmental and energy strategy exerts insignificant effects on its preference for the ets although the sampled companies are very willing to save energy and reduce emissions there exists an inverted u shape relationship between a company s level of mitigation technologies and its attitudes towards the ets the carbon price fails to stimulate companies to upgrade mitigation technologies the majority of companies treat participation in the ets only as a means of improving ties with governments as well as of earning a good social reputation rather than as a cost effective mechanism to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions

lifecycle approach to assessing environmental friendly product project with internalizing environmental externality abstract with tightening environmental regulation and increasing awareness of environmental externalities firms are compelled to take initiatives on environmental protection through such measures as investing in environmental technologies and developing environmental friendly products efps producing the efp is more costly due to additional investment cost and faces the cost competitive challenge this paper conducts a research on how to have the firms voluntarily produce the efp to remedy negative externalities from the prospect of the firm our research focuses on investigating the relationship between policy incentives and economic performance of the efp with a lifecycle approach and probing into the impact of the policy incentives on the efp s commercial feasibility and process of internalizing externalities in view of the efp lifecycle a two stage model is developed to capture its market penetration features while replacing conventional products as an example of the efp a case analysis of hybrid vehicles is presented where the amount of the policy incentives for the efp to be cost competitive is quantitatively assessed and the efp s breakeven in terms of net present value is estimated as well the results show that the required policy incentives are interrelated with additional investment incremental operating costs breakeven sales quantity of the efp and the cost factor that incorporates effectiveness and efficiency of using environmental technologies for energy saving pollutant reduction and business risk

a noncooperative theory of coalitional bargaining the authors explore a sequential offers model of n person coalitional bargaining with transferable utility and with time discounting their focus is on the efficiency properties of stationary equilibria of strictly superadditive games when the discount factor delta is sufficiently large it is shown that delay and the formation of inefficient subcoalitions can occur in equilibrium the latter for some or all orders of proposer however efficient stationary equilibrium payoffs converge to a point in the core as delta approaches one strict convexity is a sufficient condition for there to exist an efficient stationary equilibrium payoff vector for sufficiently high delta

group formation in risk sharing arrangements we study informal insurance within communities explicitly recognizing the possibility that subgroups of individuals may destabilize insurance arrangements among the larger group we therefore consider self enforcing risk sharing agreements that are robust not only to single person deviations but also to potential deviations by subgroups however such deviations must be credible in the sense that the subgroup must pass exactly the same test that we apply to the entire group it must itself employ some self enforcing risk sharing agreement we observe that the stability of subgroups is inimical to the stability of the group as a whole two surprising consequences of this analysis are that stable groups have uniformly bounded size a result in sharp contrast to the individual deviation problem and that the degree of risk sharing in a community is generally non monotonic in the level of uncertainty or need for insurance in the community

sprayed to death path dependence lock in and pest control strategies theoretical literature on the economics of technology has emphasized the effects on technological trajectories of positive feedbacks in a competition among technologies that all perform a similar function the presence of increasing returns to adoptions can force all but one technology from the market furthermore the victor need not be the superior technology this paper provides an empirical study of one technological competition which illuminates this theoretical work it uses theoretical results to explain why chemical control of agricultural pests remains the dominant technology in spite of many claims that it is inferior to its main competitor integrated pest management copyright 1996 by royal economic society

a property of the core abstract for any transferable utility game in coalitional form with nonempty core we show that given any allocation outside the core there is an allocation in the core that indirectly dominates it journal of economic literatureclassification number c71

a noncooperative coalitional bargaining game with random proposers abstract we extend the stahl rubinstein s alternating offer model ton person coalitional bargaining the key feature of the model is the random selection of proposers at every round no delay of agreement occurs in equilibrium for a super additive game in contrast to the fixed order model of chatterjeeet al rev econ stud 60 1993 463 477 when the discount factor of future payoffs is sufficiently high the agreement on the grand coalition is reached if and only if it has the largest value per capita among all coalitions moreover in the limit as the discount factor goes to one all players divide equally the value of the grand coalition regardless of who makes a proposal journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c72 c73 c78

the stability of hedonic coalition structures we consider the partitioning of a society into coalitions in purely hedonic settings i e where each player s payoff is completely determined by the identity of other members of her coalition we first discuss how hedonic and nonhedonic settings differ and some sufficient conditions for the existence of core stable coalition partitions in hedonic settings we then focus on a weaker stability condition individual stability where no player can benefit from moving to another coalition while not hurting the members of that new coalition we show that if coalitions can be ordered according to some characteristic over which players have single peaked preferences or where players have symmetric and additively separable preferences then there exists an individually stable coalition partition examples show that without these conditions individually stable coalition partitions may not exist we also discuss some other stability concepts and the incompatibility of stability with other normative properties journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 a14 d20

dynamics and stability of constitutions coalitions and clubs a central feature of dynamic collective decision making is that the rules that govern the procedures for future decision making and the distribution of political power across players are determined by current decisions for example current constitutional change must take into account how the new constitution may pave the way for further changes in laws and regulations we develop a general framework for the analysis of this class of dynamic problems under relatively natural acyclicity assumptions we provide a complete characterization of dynamically stable states as functions of the initial state and determine conditions for their uniqueness we show how this framework can be applied in political economy coalition formation and the analysis of the dynamics of clubs the explicit characterization we provide highlights two intuitive features of dynamic collective decision making 1 a social arrangement is made stable by the instability of alternative arrangements that are preferred by sufficiently many members of the society 2 efficiency enhancing changes are often resisted because of further social changes that they will engender

to deter or to moderate alliance formation in contests with incomplete information we consider two players choice about the formation of an alliance ahead of conflict in a framework with incomplete information about the strength of the potential ally when deciding on alliance formation players anticipate the self selection of other players and the informational value of own and other players choices in the absence of these signaling effects strong players have an incentive to stand alone which leads to a separating equilibrium this separating equilibrium can be destabilized by deception incentives if beliefs are updated on the basis of endogenous alliance formation choices weak players may find it attractive to appear strong in order to deter competitors from positive effort choices strong players may find it attractive to appear weak in order to give their competitors a false sense of security and then beat them with little effort moreover appearing weak allows players to free ride when alliances are formed jel d72 d74

stable coalition structures with externalities this paper argues that the sign of external effects of coalition formation provides a useful organizing principle in examining economic coalitions in many interesting economic games coalition formation creates either negatie externalities or posi tie externalities for nonmembers examples of negative externalities are research coalitions and customs unions examples of positive externalities include output cartels and public goods coalitions i characterize and compare stable coalition structures under the following three rules of coalition formation the open