Benedetto Gui

• Professor
• Full Professor at Istituto Universitario Sophia

In this note I discuss Robert Sugden’s original proposal of a market morality of mutual benefit, thoroughly expounded in his recent Community of Advantage. He envisions that jointly aiming at the benefit of all the parties in a transaction—a motivation different from both self-interest and altruism—can really make the market beneficial for everyone...

We study the contractual design problem of a seller that observes an ex-post signal correlated with the buyer’s valuation and can make the allocation, but not payments, contingent on it. We show that, to maximize her profit, the seller should offer a menu of contracts whereby the good is transferred to the buyer only if the signal is sufficiently l...

We study the properties of simple mobile broadband Internet plans characterized by a data cap and an up-front price. Assuming demand uncertainty and a positive correlation between users’ valuations and (expected) demands, we show that a monopolistic provider does always find it convenient to offer one plan with binding cap together with an unlimite...

A large population of fixed-type agents engage in exclusive pairwise relationships in a decentralized setting. At the onset, agents randomly meet in pairs under private information of individual time-invariant types. They play a voluntary contribution game. At the end of the first period, members of each pair either stay together in the second peri...

Resumo As empresas que participam no movimento da “Economia de Comunhão” comprometem-se a distribuir até dois terços dos seus lucros para ajudar pessoas necessitadas e para difundir, especialmente na esfera económica, uma cultura de dar e partilhar. Além disso, elas comprometem- se a ter um estilo de gestão e operação, que sublinha a dignidade de c...

The paper investigates the numerous reciprocal influences between interpersonal events of a communicative/affective nature, and the entities or actions we commonly identify as economic. A face-to-face interaction, or 'encounter', is depicted as a special productive process in which agents -besides exchanging ordinary goods or delivering services -c...

The present paper provides an introduction to this special issue devoted to Happiness and Relational Goods. We start by presenting a few concepts that have recently appeared in the economic literature with the aim of capturing some of the peculiarities of personalised interactions. We claim that these concepts can be subsumed fairly well under the...

This note comments on Bruni and Sugden's interesting notion of fraternity among contract partners as joint commitment to cooperate for mutual benefit. I raise two points on their paper, both concerning the role of sacrifice. First I maintain that, differently from other social preferences, guilt aversion (or warm glow) does not imply self-sacrifice...

We consider a model with a monopolist that generates externalities. Externalities depend on either the volume of services provided X ,o r the number of clients N, or both. We study the socially optimal prices and propose a regulatory mechanism to decentralize the optimum allocation. We then compare the merits of this approach and of optimal taxatio...

Is sociality decaying? Are the hidden foundations of society silently crumbling beneath the ever more complex institutional buildings we are busy constructing or repairing on top of them? That many people are concerned about these questions is obvious from the response evoked by Robert Putnam's (1993b, 1995, 2000) recent claims that, at least in th...

Economics and Social Interaction is a fresh attempt to overcome the traditional inability of economics to deal with interpersonal phenomena that occur within the sphere of markets and productive organizations. It makes use of traditional economic concepts for understanding interpersonal events, while venturing beyond those concepts to give a better...

In this paper, the author focuses on personalized interactions, or ‘encounters’, that are presented as peculiar productive processes producing – among more usual outputs such as transactions –‘relational goods’. This theoretical framework allows us to push the economic discourse deeper into a variety of social and economic phenomena: the examples p...

The paper investigates the interpersonal dimension of economic reality—i.e. the reciprocal influences between interpersonal phenomena of a communicative\affective nature and usual economic phenomena. A face-to-face interaction, or ‘encounter’, is depicted as a special productive process in which agents—besides exchanging ordinary goods or deliverin...

The authors discuss the concept of 'team human capital' and study the renegotiation of labor compensation after team members privately observe their own reservation wage. As labor productivity can only be high if the number of quits does not exceed a threshold, decisions concerning acceptance of individual wage demands become interdependent. When a...

Discusses the concept of “relational goods”, defined as intangible capital assets that inhere in enduring interpersonal relationships and provide both intrinsic and instrumental benefits. They are local public goods that are formed or maintained through non-contractible, co-ordinated actions. Presents a simple model of investment in exogenously for...

We consider those studies of worker-managed firms that estimate production functions augmented to include indexes of worker participation. We argue that, when output is measured by value added, participation can affect output not only via technical effects, as usually interpreted, but also via distinct economic effects. We formalize a situation in...

When product quality is unobservable before purchase, the equilibrium price may be inefficiently high in order to signal high quality. We present a reputation model where under reasonable assumption nonprofit organizations can credibly charge lower prices than for-profit organizations.

The property-rights structure of the “Basque” firm, directly derived from Mondragon industrial cooperatives, is discussed in this paper which focuses on two prominent characteristics: the “capital accounts” and the collective reserve fund. It is shown that the Basque firm, although it does not allow membership rights to be traded, is in a better po...

We model the coesistence in the labour market of a conventional sector and a socially responsible sector, the latter specialised in taking advantage of workers' intrinsic motivations. Some features of the model are drawn from the previ-ous literature: the crowding out of intrinsic motivations by incentive schemes connecting pay to individual perfor...