The recent globalization of world economies has led the retail markets of developed countries towards increasing levels of integration and strategic interdependence. A non negligible share of retail and food markets is currently served by co-operative societies. Consistently with this trend, the...

We consider a class of symmetric games with externalities across coalitions and show that, under certain regularity conditions, restricting the deviating power to majority guarantees the existence of core-stable allocations. We also show that if majorities can extract resources from minorities,...

We present a model of endogenous formation of R&D agreements among firms in which also the timing of R&D investments is made endogenous. The purpose is to bridge two usually separate streams of literature, the endogenous formation of R&D alliances and the endogenous timing literature. This...

In many strategic settings comparing the payo¤s obtained by players under full cooperation to those obtainable at a sequential (Stackelberg) equilibrium can be crucial to determine the final outcome of the game. This happens, for instance, in repeated games in which players can break...

This paper studies how the possibility for firms to sign collusive agreements (as for instance being part of alliances, cartels and mergers) may affect their quality and price choice in a market with vertically differentiated goods. For this purpose we model the firm decisions as a three-stage...

One of the standard predictions of the agency theory is that more incentives can be given to agents with lower risk aversion. In this paper we show that this relationship may be absent or reversed when the technology is endogenous and projects with a higher efficiency are also riskier. Using a...

Mission-driven nonprofit organizations compete for donations through fundraising activities. Such competition can lead to inefficient outcomes, if nonprofits impose externalities on each others' output. This paper studies the sustainability of fundraising coordination agreements, using a...

In this paper we review a number of coalitional solution concepts for the analysis of cartel and merger stability in oligopoly. We show that, although so far the industrial organization and the cooperative game-theoretic literature have proceeded somehow independently on this topic, the two...

One of the standard predictions of the agency theory is that more incentives can be given to agents with lower risk aversion. In this paper we show that this relationship may be absent or reversed when the technology is endogenous and projects with a higher efficiency are also riskier. Using a...

Mission-driven nonprofit organizations compete for donations through fundraising activities. Such competition can lead to inefficient outcomes, if nonprofits impose externalities on each others' output. This paper studies the sustainability of fundraising coordination agreements, using a...