Essays on economic design and coalition formation

This thesis consists of three essays on economic design and coalition formation. The first chapter studies the stability of many-to-one matching, such as matching between students and colleges or interns and hospitals. Complementarities and peer effects are inherent in many such matching situations. The chapter provides the first sufficient condition for stability that may be used to study matching with complementarities and peer effects. The condition offered is shown to be also necessary for stability in some matching problems. The second chapter provides a sufficient condition for the non-emptiness of the core in coalition formation such as the formation of clubs, partnerships, firms, business alliances, and jurisdictions voting on public goods. The condition is formulated for settings in which agents first form coalitions and then each coalition realizes a payoff profile from the set of available alternatives via a mechanism. In particular, there exists a core coalition structure if the payoffs are determined in the Tullock rent-seeking game or Nash bargaining. The core might be empty if the payoffs are determined by the Kalai-Smorodinsky or Shapley bargaining solutions.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Pycia, Marek

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Bengt Holmstrom and Glenn Ellison.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34513

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34513