The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond presents the full text of the September 20, 1995 working paper entitled "The Coalition-proof Core in Adverse Selection Economies," written by Jeffrey M. Lacker and John A. Weinberg. The text is available in PDF format. This paper investigates the core in the adverse selection insurance economy that was originally studied by Stiglitz and Rothschild. The authors find that the coalition-proof core is always nonempty in this economy and has attractive continuity properties.

One of the main problems in current economic theory is to write contracts which are Pareto optimal, incentive compatible, and also implementable as a perfect Bayesian equilibrium of a dynamic, noncooperative game. The question arises whether it is possible to provide Walrasian type or cooperative equilibrium concepts which have these properties. This volume contains original contributions on noncooperative and cooperative equilibrium notions in economies with differential information and provides answers to the above questions. Moreover, issues of stability, learning and continuity of alternative equilibria are also examined.

Issues relating to the emergence, persistence, and stability of cooperation among social agents of every type are widely recognized to be of paramount importance. They are also analytically difficult and intellectually challenging. This book, arising from a NATO Advanced Study Institute held at SUNY in 1994, is an up-to-date presentation of the contribution of game theory to the subject. The contributors are leading specialists who focus on the problem from the many different angles of game theory, including axiomatic bargaining theory, the Nash program of non-cooperative foundations, game with complete information, repeated and sequential games, bounded rationality methods, evolutionary theory, experimental approaches, and others. Together they offer significant progress in understanding cooperation.