In this paper we apply the instrumental approach to social preferences in order to distinguish among various shapes of preferences for social status. In particular, we consider the shape of reduced preferences that emerge in the equilibrium of a two-sided matching model with non-transferable...

We present a model of two-sided matching where utility is non-transferable and information about individualsʼ skills is private, utilities are strictly increasing in the partnerʼs skill and satisfy increasing differences. Skills can be either revealed or kept hidden, but while agents on one...

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a typical structure of interaction in human societies. In spite of a long tradition dealing with the matter from different perspectives, the emergence of cooperation or defection still remains a controversial issue from both an empirical and a theoretical point of view....

We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for goods to be normal when utility functions are differentiable and strongly quasi-concave. Our condition is equivalent to the condition proposed by Alarie et al. (1990), but it is easier to check: it only requires to compute the minors associated...

We demonstrate that in models where agents have concerns for status the model predictions can drastically change depending on whether status is modelled as an ordinal or cardinal magnitude. As a proof, we show that two well known theoretical findings are not robust to the substitution of ordinal...

If preferences are rational and continuous, then strict convexity implies that the demand correspondence is single-valued (e.g. Barten and Böhm, 1982, lemma 7.3). We show that if, in addition, preferences are strictly monotone then the converse is also true, namely single-valuedness of the...