The aim of this arti cle is to show that the New Insti tuti onal Economics is an interdisciplinary stream combining economics, law, organizati on theory, politi cal sciences, sociology, and anthropology. The main theories which are part of the New Insti tuti onal Economics are: Agency Theory,...

The property rights approach to the theory of the firm suggests that ownership structures are chosen in order to provide ex ante investment incentives, while bargaining is ex post efficient. In contrast, transaction cost economics emphasizes ex post inefficiencies. In the present paper, a party...

Europe is reorganizing its international value chain. I document these changes in Europe’s international organization of production with new survey data of Austrian and German firms investing in Eastern Europe. I show estimates of the share of intra-firm trade between Austria and Germany on...

We study problems of allocating objects among people. Some objects may be initially owned and the rest are unowned. Each person needs exactly one object and initially owns at most one object. We drop the common assumption of strict preferences. Without this assumption, it suffices to study...

When appropriation possibilities are overlooked, the predictions of standard trade models can be misleading. Trade theorists need a new class of models designed to investigate the effects of appropriation possibilities on exchange. Toward this end we incorporate appropriation possibilities into...

Core theory furnishes a useful framework for studying a wide variety of economic problems. It has an undeserved reputation of being too abstract owing mainly to the manner in which it is employed in the theory of general equilibrium. In fact, core theory is a highly flexible way of looking at...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

In an exchange economy with incomplete information, the signaling core is defined by the set of state-contingent allocations to which no coalitions object under informational leakage through proposals by informed agents. An objection underlying the signaling core is supported by a sequential...

We establish a link between cooperative and competitive behavior. For every possible vector of weights of an asymmetric Nash bargaining solution there exists a market that has this asymmetric Nash bargaining solution as its unique competitive payoff vector.

We delineate the various ways in which rights to environmental and other resources can be assigned to individuals or groups. We then examine models of individual and group interactions, drawing out their implications for the ways in which resources will be utilized and managed under various...