A freeze-out bond exchange offer can occur when a firm wants to replace an exist- ing bond, issued with a covenant, with a new bond that does not have this type of restriction. If the bondholders are not fully coordinated, the shareholders can make the exchange offer unfair to capture wealth...

When contracts are not enforceable, or property rights are not clearly defined, individuals might lack an incentive to carry out costly investments even when they are socially efficient. Some recent contributions such as Ellingsen and Robles (2002) prove that this problem might be less dramatic...

This paper addresses the emergence of cooperation in asymmetric pris- oners' dilemmas in which one player chooses after having observed the other player's choice (Trust Game). We use the finite automata approach with complexity costs to study the equilibria of the repeated version of this game....

We present an axiomatic model of choice involving two agents, motivated by the experimental evidence on non-selfish preferences. We distinguish two classes of social preferences, depending on whether they are or not separable. Altruism and spite (Andreoni & Miller, 2002; Cox et al., 2007) are...

Hayek's approach to cultural and institutional evolution has been frequently criticized because it is explicitly based on the controversial notion of (cultural) group selection. In this paper this criticism is rejected on the basis of recent works on biological and cultural evolution. The...

Hayek’s approach to cultural and institutional evolution has been frequently criticized because it is explicitly based on the controversial notion of (cultural) group selection. In this paper this criticism is rejected on the basis of recent works on biological and cultural evolution. The...

Inspection games are 2x2 games in which one playermust decide whether to inspect the other player, who in turnmust decide whether to infringe a norm or a regulation.Inspection games have a single, mixed strategy Nashequilibrium, which has counter-intuitive comparative staticsproperties. This...

Holler and Wickstrom (1999) suggest that social change can be triggered by scandals intentionally created by groups of people who intend to change the current social conventions. I elaborate on their approach, introducing the hypothesis that people's preferences change over time, so that they...