Trade fragmentation and coordination in bilateral oligopolies
This paper studies a strategic market game where agents fragment their bids on different markets. Simple conditions for existence of an interior equilibrium point are provided. In equilibrium, all agents are active on the same markets and prices are identical across markets, so that all equilibria are equivalent to an equilibrium where all agents trade on a single market.
Stable Trading Structures in Bilateral Oligopolies
This paper analyses the formation of trading groups in a bilateral market with strategic traders. A trading structure (a partition of the set of traders into trading groups) is strongly stable if no coalition of traders can deviate and increase the utility of some of its members while making no other member worse off. It is weakly stable if no coalition of traders can deviate and make all its members strictly better off. The only strongly stable trading structure is the grand coalition, where all agents trade on the same market. Other weakly stable trading structures exist and are characterized by a strong ordering property: trading groups can be ranked by size and cannot contain very different numbers of traders of the two types. In the particular example where traders have log-linear utility functions, the set of weakly stable trading structures is completely characterized.
The Use of Qualitative Information in Macro-Economic Policy Analysis
The majority of macro-economic policy models takes for granted that conflicts among objectives can be assessed by means of a tradeoff analysis. Such tradeoffs imply that sacrifices and benefits of various impacts of decisions can be measured on a cardinal scale, so that a conventional macro-economic utility or welfare analysis can be applied.