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This book aims at the development of an institutional approach to general economic equilibrium. It is argued that general equilibrium theory forms a well-rounded basis for the development of an institutional economic theory. The fundamental economic trade mechanism underlying this re-focusing is that of the Edgeworthian barter mechanism modeled through the equilibrium notion of the core of an economy. In the first part a summary of the well-established insights regarding the core of an economy is given. Next the book explores the extensive literature that links the core with the Walrasian price mechanism through core convergence results, the comparison of core allocations with Walrasian equilibrium allocations, and equivalence results. In the second part an alternative model of Edgeworthian barter in the setting of a large institutionally structured economy is developed. Two new Edgeworthian equilibrium concepts are considered - the semi-core and the contract-core. The book concludes by showing that equivalence is extremely hard to achieve and that perfect competition thus has a pathological nature

AbstractWe study a class of non-cooperative aggregative games—referred to as social purpose games—in which the payoffs depend separately on a player's own strategy (individual benefits) and on a function of the strategy profile which is common to all players (social benefits) weighted by an individual benefit parameter. This structure allows for an asymmetric assessment of a common social benefit across players. We show that these games have a weighted potential, and we investigate its properties. We investigate the payoff structure and the uniqueness of Nash equilibria and social optima. Furthermore, following the literature on partial cooperation, we investigate the leadership of a single coalition of cooperators, while the rest of players act as non-cooperative followers. In particular, we show that social purpose games admit the emergence of a stable coalition of cooperators for the subclass of strict social purpose games. As a particular application, we study a standard formulation of the tragedy of the commons. We show that there emerges a single stable coalition of cooperators that curbs the over-exploitation of the common resource.

AbstractWe investigate the stability of cooperation agreements, such as those agreed by cartels, among firms in a Cournot model of oligopolistic competition embedded in a multimarket contact setting. Our analysis considers a broad array of 64 potential market structural configurations under linear demand and quadratic production costs. We establish that for an appropriate range of parameter values there exists a unique core stable market configuration in which an identical two‐firm cartel is sustained in both markets. Our result highlights the significance of multimarket presence for cartel formation in light of the well‐known result from the single‐market setting where cartels are non‐profitable.

We consider a class of cooperative network games with transferable utilities in which players interact through a probabilistic network rather than a regular, deterministic network. In this class of wealth-generating situations we consider probabilistic extensions of the Myerson value and the position value. For the subclass of probabilistic network games in multilinear form, we establish characterizations of these values using an appropriate formulation of component balancedness. We show axiomatizations based on extensions of the well-accepted properties of equal bargaining power, balanced contributions, and balanced link contributions.