Formal methods use computers to verify proofs or even discover new theorems. Interest in applying formal methods to problems in economics has increased in the past decade, but - to date - none of this work has been published in economics journals. This paper applies formal methods to a familiar...

Pillage games [Jordan, 2006, "Pillage and Property", JET] have two features that make them richer than cooperative games in either characteristic or partition function form: they allow power externalities between coalitions; they allow resources to contribute to coalitions' power as well as to...

Jordan [2006] defined ‘pillage games’, a class of cooperative games whose dominance operator represents a ‘power function’ constrained by monotonicity axioms. In this environment, he proved that stable sets must be finite. We bound their cardinality above by a Ramsey number and show this...

Jordan [2006] defined ‘pillage games’, a class of cooperative games whose dominance operator is represented by a ‘power function’ satisfying coalitional and resource monotonicity axioms. In this environment, he proved that stable sets must be finite. We use graph theory to reinterpret...

We introduce 'formal methods' of mechanized reasoning from computer science to address two problems in auction design and practice: is a given auction design soundly specified, possessing its intended properties; and, is the design faithfully implemented when actually run? Failure on either...

See Birmingham Discussion Paper 05-19 (December 2005) for current version.

We study extinction in a commons problem in which agents have access to capital markets. When the commons grows more quickly than the interest rate, multiple equilibria are found for intermediate commons endowments. In one of these, welfare decreases as the resource becomes more abundant, a...

We study option management by committee. Analysis is illustrated by tenure decisions. Our innovations are two-fold: we treat the committee's problem as one of social choice, not of information aggregation; and we endogenise the outside option: rejecting a candidate at either the probationary or...

We study option management by committee. Analysis is illustrated by tenure decisions. Our innovations are two-fold: we treat the committee's problem as one of social choice, not information aggregation; and we endogenise the outside option: rejecting a candidate at either the probationary or...