Interactive Blocking in Arrow-Debreu Economies

Xiong, Siyang; Zheng, Charles Zhoucheng

WP #08006, March 2008 (Revised on November 2, 2008)

Competitive behaviors such as outbidding one's rivals may be countered by the rivals' threat of mutually destructive objections. In an Arrow-Debreu model of production economies with firms privatized by property rights, we model such hindered competitive behaviors as a coalition's attempt to block a status quo given the threat that the outsiders of the coalition, especially those with whom the coalition shares ownership of firms, may resort to production-ruining secession. We introduce new concepts of the core such that a coalition's blocking plan is feasible only if it is not blocked by the outsiders with such secession. Based on such notions, we prove core equivalence theorems in the replication framework.

Keywords: core, coalition, core equivalence, blocking, production, firms