Consider a principal who hires heterogeneous agents to work for him over T periods, without prior knowledge of their respective skills, and intends to promote one of them at the end. In each period the agents choose effort levels and produce random outputs, independently of each other, and are...

A general and practical competitive market model for trading indivisible goods is introduced. There are a group of buyers and a group of sellers, and several indivisible goods. Each buyer is initially endowed with a sufficient amount of money and each seller is endowed with several units of each...

We study markets in which agents first make investments and are then matched into potentially productive partnerships. Equilibrium investments and the equilibrium matching will be efficient if agents can simultaneously negotiate investments and matches, but we focus on markets in which agents...

In a previous essay we modeled the enforcement of contract, and through it the provision of money and markets, as a production function within the society, the scale of which is optimized endogenously by labor allocation away from primary production of goods. Government and a central bank...

The competitive market structure of a decentralized economy is converted into a self-policing system treating the bureaucracy and enforcement of the legal system endogenously. In particular we consider money systems as constructs to make agents' economic strategies predictable from knowledge of...

A large literature uses matching models to analyze markets with two-sided heterogeneity, studying problems such as the matching of students to schools, residents to hospitals, husbands to wives, and workers to firms. The analysis typically assumes that the agents have complete information, and...

The use of equilibrium models in economics springs from the desire for parsimonious models of economic phenomena that take human reasoning into account. This approach has been the cornerstone of modern economic theory. We explain why this is so, extolling the virtues of equilibrium theory; then...

We argue that even when macroeconomic variables are constant, underlying microeconomic uncertainty and borrowing constraints generate inflation. We study stochastic economies with fiat money, a central bank, one nondurable commodity, countably many time periods, and a continuum of agents. The...

The OLG model of Allais and Samuelson retains the methodological assumptions of agent optimization and market clearing from the Arrow-Debreu model, yet its equilibrium set has different properties: Pareto inefficiency, indeterminacy, positive valuation of money, and a golden rule equilibrium in...

A discussion is given of the problems involved in the formal modeling of the innovation process. The link between innovation and finance is stressed. The nature of how the circular flow of funds is broken and the role of finance in evaluation and control is discussed.