The financing of higher education through public spending imposes a transfer of resources from taxpayers to university students and their parents. We provide an explanation for this phenomenon. Those who attend higher education will earn more income in the future and will pay more taxes. People...

In this paper we consider a model of cooperative production in which rational agents have the possibility to engage in sabotage activities that decrease output. It is shown that sabotage depends on the interplay between the degree of congestion, the technology of sabotage, the number of agents...

In this note we show that no solution to coalition formation games can satisfy a set of axioms that we propose as reasonable. Our result points out that "solutions" to the coalition formation cannot be interpreted as predictions of what would be ìresting pointsî for a game in the way stable...

A decision-maker exhibits preference for flexibility if he always prefers any set of alternatives to its subsets, even when two of them contain the same best element. Desire for flexibility can be explained as the consequence of the agent's uncertainty along a two-stage process, where he must...

This paper studies economies where agents exchange indivisible goods and money. Agents have potential use for all indivisible goods and the indivisible goods are differentiated. We assume that agents have quasi-linear utilities in money, have sufficient money endowments to afford any group of...

We provide an elementary proof showing how in economics with an arbitrary number of agents an arbitrary number of public goods and utility functions quasi-linear in money, any efficient and individually rational mechanism is not strategy-proof for any economy satisfying a mild regularity...

This paper proposes an argument that explains incumbency advantage without recurring to the collective irresponsibility of legislatures. For that purpose, we exploit the informational value of incumbency: incumbency confers voters information about governing politicians not available from...

We present a model of cooperative production in which rational agents might carry out sabotage activities that decrease output. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a Nash equilibrium without sabotage. It is shown that the absence of sabotage in equilibrium depends...