Essays on public decision-making and regional agglomeration.
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This dissertation investigates two problems: coalition formation in social choice problems and regional agglomeration under monopolistic competition. The first essay studies how individuals divide themselves into coalitions and choose a public alternative for each coalition. When preferences have consecutive support and coalition feasible sets are positively population-responsive, the proposed consecutive benevolence solution generates allocations that are stable and equitable. However, when each coalition follows a single-valued collective decision rule, the coalition structure core may be empty.;The second essay studies the indeterminacy of equilibria in city formation under monopolistic competition and increasing returns (Fujita and Krugman 1995). Multiple equilibria of city systems have been studied in the literature. Nevertheless, a broader picture of the equilibrium set is absent. How many dimensions does it have? The determination of dimension is important since it reveals (i) the degree of indeterminacy in the model, (ii) the number of free variables for computational work, and (iii) the validity of comparative statics. Employing the differentiable approach, my main theorem shows that for any number K, the equilibria with K distinct cities has a smooth manifold of dimension K-1 as its interior and is approximately contained in the closure of the manifold for almost all parameter values. This raises the issue of indeterminacy: the equilibrium set is generically a continuum of a rather high dimension.;The third essay studies the dynamics of regional migration that results in one region dominating another and becoming a manufacturing center. The pitchfork bifurcation is popularized by Fujita, Krugman and Venables (1999) as an explanation of how two symmetric regions diverge into a core-periphery pattern. It is a split bifurcation where more than two equilibrium loci meet at a point. The choice of parameters affects the dynamical behavior in this model (Anas and Li 2001). I study the robustness of bifurcations when parameters change along arbitrary smooth paths in a regular parameter space. The result is that parameter paths without a split bifurcation are generic among smooth paths. In the case of two regions, paths without a bifurcation are open.