Essays in organization formation and decision making

This thesis consists of three essays in microeconomic theory. The first two are about the formation of organizations, and the third is about individual or organizational decision making in ambiguous settings. In the first essay I explore the implications of costs associated with binding agreements on equilibrium agreement structures. Establishing binding agreements is often costly in real world economies. These contracting costs are usually regarded as harmful by economists as the costs decrease the gains from cooperation. They affect which agreements form by changing the incentives of agents, potentially prevent the establishment of efficient contracts. Using an alternating offers bargaining model of coalition formation I show that the presence of transaction costs can lead to an efficient outcome in situations where inefficiency arises in equilibrium without these costs. These results provide new insights for policies targeting transaction costs. There are many situations in Economics and Political Science that involve limited possibilities for firms or parties to organize themselves into groups, mostly due to regulatory restrictions. In addition, in these settings the surplus of a given group often depends on the organizational structures formed outside of the group. The second essay introduces a coalition formation model that is able to analyze markets with both restricted cooperation and externalities across coalitions. This concept allows a more realistic modeling, opening the possibility to use this framework to analyze the welfare effects of mergers. In the third essay I propose a new model of decision making under uncertainty with multiple priors that is, unlike the well-known model of Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989), able to express attitude towards ambiguity. In addition, the decision does not necessarily depend on the two extreme (worst case and best case) priors as in the model of Ghirardato et al. (2001). I use choice correspondences by lexicographic semiorders that are generalizations of the choice functions defined in Manzini and Mariotti (2012). I also provide a method constructing lexicographic semiorders for choosing from ambiguous acts

Proceedings of the 8th Cologne-Twente Workshop on Graphs and Combinatorial Optimization

International audienceThe Cologne-Twente Workshop (CTW) on Graphs and Combinatorial Optimization started off as a series of workshops organized bi-annually by either Köln University or Twente University. As its importance grew over time, it re-centered its geographical focus by including northern Italy (CTW04 in Menaggio, on the lake Como and CTW08 in Gargnano, on the Garda lake). This year, CTW (in its eighth edition) will be staged in France for the first time: more precisely in the heart of Paris, at the Conservatoire National d’Arts et Métiers (CNAM), between 2nd and 4th June 2009, by a mixed organizing committee with members from LIX, Ecole Polytechnique and CEDRIC, CNAM

Fuzzy Techniques for Decision Making 2018

Zadeh's fuzzy set theory incorporates the impreciseness of data and evaluations, by imputting the degrees by which each object belongs to a set. Its success fostered theories that codify the subjectivity, uncertainty, imprecision, or roughness of the evaluations. Their rationale is to produce new flexible methodologies in order to model a variety of concrete decision problems more realistically. This Special Issue garners contributions addressing novel tools, techniques and methodologies for decision making (inclusive of both individual and group, single- or multi-criteria decision making) in the context of these theories. It contains 38 research articles that contribute to a variety of setups that combine fuzziness, hesitancy, roughness, covering sets, and linguistic approaches. Their ranges vary from fundamental or technical to applied approaches

LIPIcs, Volume 244, ESA 2022, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 244, ESA 2022, Complete Volum