The labour economics literature on signalling assumes workers know their own abilities. Well-settled experimental evidence contradicts that assumption: in the absence of hard facts, subjects are on average overcon ̄dent. First we show that in any equilibrium of any signalling model, overcon ̄dence cannot make players better o®. In order to obtain more detailed predictions, we then introduce a spe...

We examine spatial competition along a waterway when shippers are distributed over space. Competition is between barge and rail companies and among barge companies. Equilibrium prices are derived for two variations: oligopolistic rivalry between barge and rail operators, and oligopolistic rivalry among barge operators with terminals located at different points on the waterway. In the first vari...

This paper presents a model of urban traffic congestion that allows for hypercongestion. Hypercongestion has fundamental importance for the costs of congestion and the effect of policies such as road pricing, transit provision and traffic management, treated in the paper. In the simplest version of the model, the unregulated Nash equilibrium is also the social optimum among a wide range of pote...

This paper addresses partly an open question raised in the Handbook of Mathematical economics about the orientability of the pseudo-equilibrium manifold in the basic two-period General Equilibrium with Incomplete markets (GEI) model. For a broad class of explicit asset structures, it is proved that the asset equilibrium space is an orientable manifold if S − J is even. This implies, under the s...

Recent advances in evolutionary theory have some important implications for environmental economics. A short overview is offered of evolutionary thinking in economics. Subsequently, major concepts and approaches in evolutionary biology and evolutionary economics are presented and compared. Attention is devoted, among others, to Darwinian selection, punctuated equilibrium, sorting mechanisms, La...

We investigate situations in which agents can only communicate to each other through a chain of intermediators, for example because they have to obey institutionalized communication protocols. We assume that all involved in the communication are strategic, and might want to influence the action taken by the final receiver. The set of pure strategy equilibrium outcomes is simple to characterize,...