This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

Local interactions refer to social and economic phenomena where individuals' choices are influenced by the choices of others who are close to them socially or geographically. This represents a fairly accurate picture of human experience. Furthermore, since local interactions imply particular...

We choose between alternatives without being fully informed about the rewards from different courses of action. In making our decisions, we use our own past experience and the experience of others. So the ways in which we interact - our social network - can influence our choices. These choices...

Using the author's own experiences, this chapter shows how agent-based modeling (ABM) can address research questions common to many disciplines, facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, provide a useful multidisciplinary tool when the math is intractable, and reveal unity across disciplines....

Biconcavity is a simple condition on inverse demand that corresponds to the ordinary concept of concavity after simultaneous parameterized transformations of price and quantity. The notion is employed here in the framework of the homogeneous-good Cournot model with potentially heterogeneous...

Biconcavity is a simple condition on inverse demand that corresponds to the ordinary concept of concavity after simultaneous parameterized transformations of price and quantity. The notion is employed here in the framework of the homogeneous-good Cournot model with potentially heterogeneous...

We introduce a simple two-stage game of endogenous network formation and information sharing for reasoning about the optimal design of social networks like Facebook or Google+. We distinguish between unilateral and bilateral connections and between targeted and collective information sharing....

Previous evidence shows that better insurance coverage increases medical expenditure. However, formal studies on the effect of spending on health outcomes, and especially mental health, are lacking. To fill this gap, we reanalyze data from the Rand Health Insurance Experiment and estimate a...

The present paper considers the issue of High Frequency Trading (HFT) regulation. Rather than discussing macro-level effects of HFT that are still under debate (Sornette & Von der Becke, 2011) its analysis focuses on the issue of regulation from the perspective of HFT firms. Assuming that HFT...

How should we make value judgments about wealth inequality? Harsanyi (1953) proposes to take an individual who evaluates her well-being by expected utility and ask her to evaluate the wealth possibilities ex-ante (i.e. before she finds her place in society, i.e., under the "veil of ignorance" of...