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 consider a microfounded urban growth model with two regions and a mass of mobile workers to study interactions among growth, agglomeration, and urban congestion. Unlike previous research in the urban growth literature, we formulate the model as a one-shot game and take an evolutionary...

Demichelis & Weibull (AER 2008) show that adding lexicographic lying costs to coordination games with cheap talk yields a sharp prediction: only the efficient outcome is evolutionarily stable. I show that this result is caused by the discontinuity of preferences rather than by small lying costs...

In the lab, in both one-shot interactions and first rounds of repeated games, subjects turn out to cooperate significantly more than the well-known, classical Homo Oeconomicus model predicts. Behavioural economics has persuasively shown that this ‘irrational’ rate of cooperation is...

In several situations the consequences of an actor’s choices are also affected by the actions of other actors. This is one of the aspects which determines the complexity of social systems and make them behave as a whole. Systems characterized by such a trade-off between individual choices and...

We study the emergence of norms of cooperation in experimental economies populated by strangers interacting indefinitely. Can these economies achieve full efficiency even without formal enforcement institutions? Which institutions for monitoring and enforcement facilitate cooperation? Finally,...

Language is a powerful coordination device. We generalize the cheap-talk approach to pre-play communication by way of introducing a meaning correspondence between messages and actions, and by postulating two axioms met by natural languages. Players have a lexicographic preference, second to...