On the limits of cheap talk for public good provision

This article studies a model where, as a consequence of private information, agents do not have incentive to invest in a desired joint project, or a public good, when they are unable to have prior discussion with their partners. As a result, the joint project is never undertaken and inefficiency is observed. Agastya, Menezes and Sengupta (2007) prove that with a prior stage of communication, with a binary message space, it is possible to have some efficiency gain since "all ex-ante and interim efficient equilibria exhibit a simple structure". We show that any finite message space does not provide efficiency gain on the simple structure discussed in that article. We use laboratory experiments to test these results. We find that people do contribute, even without communication, and that any kind of communication increases the probability of project implementation. We also observed that communication reduces the unproductive contribution, and that a large message space cannot provide efficiency gain relative to the binary one.

The good, the bad and the ugly: estudo sobre pequenas e médias empresas familiares brasileiras a partir da teoria da ação de Pierre Bourdieu

According to Bourdieu (1994), there are social camps where the economic logic works upside down. Therefore, the expression ¿family business¿ is paradoxical because inside it resides two distinct and, sometimes, antagonistic logics: the business logic, whose goal is the profit, and the family logic, which aims at the common welfare. That is why one must consider the symbolical exchanges influences on the social relations more than in any other kind of company. Based on these concepts, this research presents an overview of the small and medium brazilian family business universe.