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...

The excessive compensation packages of CEOs of U.S. corporations in recent years have brought the issue of fairness to the foreground in economics. The conventional wisdom is that the free market for labor, which determines the pay packages, cares only about efficiency and not fairness. We...

We study the problem of assigning indivisible goods to individuals where each is to receive one object. To guarantee fairness in the absence of monetary compensation, we consider random assignments and analyse various equity criteria for such lotteries. In particular, we find that sd-no-envy (as...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an alternative version of a generalized game, slightly different from the one provided in the seminal paper of Arrow and Debreu (1954). In this revised framework, we introduce the concept of a competitive equilibrium and show how it can be applied to a...

Multiplicity of equilibria is a common problem in many economic models. In general, it is impossible to devise methods that always find all equilibria for any type of model. A notable exception are models in which all equilibria are solutions to a system of polynomial equations since there are...

The present paper introduces a model of dynamic equilibrium in a market, based on game theoretic approach, with specific development for capital markets and corporate strategies. The model allows to study some aspects of structural change in markets, both its dynamics and qualitative aspects. An...

Mainstream macro-models have assumed away financial frictions, in particular default. The minimum addition in order to introduce financial intermediaries, money and liquidity into such models is the possibility of default. This, in turn, requires that institutions and price formation mechanisms...

The concept of 'the core' originates in cooperative game theory and its introduction to economics in the 1960s as a basis for proofs of existence of general equilibrium is one of the earliest attempts to use game theory to address big questions in economics. Discovery of the core was met with...

We study two-sided many-to-one matching markets with transferable utilities, e.g., labor and rental housing markets, in which money can exchange hands between agents, subject to distributional constraints on the set of feasible allocations. In such markets, we establish the efficiency of...

Equilibrium assumptions posit relations between different people's beliefs and behavior without describing a process that causes these relations to hold. I show that because equilibrium models do not describe a causal process whereby one endogenous variable affects another, attempts to decompose...