We randomize advertising content motivated by the psychology literature on sympathy generation and framing effects in mailings to about 185,000 prospective new donors in India. We find significant impact on the number of donors and amounts donated consistent with sympathy biases such as the...

This paper proposes nonparametric statistical procedures for analyzing discrete choice models of affective decision making. We make two contributions to the literature on behavioral economics. Namely, we propose a procedure for eliciting the existence of a Nash equilibrium in an intrapersonal,...

This paper models how imperfect memory affects the optimal continuity of policies. We examine the choices of a player (individual or firm) who observes previous actions but cannot remember the rationale for these actions. In a stable environment, the player optimally responds to memory loss with...

This paper explains why seemingly irrational overconfident behavior can persist. Information aggregation is poor in groups in which most individuals herd. By ignoring the herd, the actions of overconfident individuals ("entrepreneurs") convey their private information. However, entrepreneurs...

While leading figures in the early history of economics conceived of it as inseparable from philosophy and other humanities, there has been movement, especially in recent decades, towards its becoming an essentially technical field with narrowly specialized areas of inquiry. Certainly,...

In a generic finite normal form game with 2(alpha) + 1 Nash equilibria, at least alpha of the equilibria are nondegenerate mixed strategy equilibria (that is, they involve randomization by some players).

History has seen many examples of the lone man ñ like Christ, Luther, Gandhi, or Hitler -- who without initial wealth or position, succeeds in changing the behavior of an entire society, for good or for ill. Whence comes this power. No doubt such leaders have possessed extraordinary ability,...

In this paper, I examine whether and how warranties serve as signals of product quality in an environment where there are opportunities for consumer moral hazard. My model is very similar to Grossman's. A risk neutral monopolist produced a good of fixed and exogenous quality. This product is...

The set of possible outcomes of a strongly ordinal bimatrix game is studied by imbedding each pair of possible payoffs as a point on the standard two-dimensional integral lattice. In particular, we count the number of different Pareto optimal sets of each cardinality; we establish asymptotic...

This is a sketch of a game theoretic and gaming approach to the development of an appropriate microeconomic theory of money and financial institutions. The phrase "money and financial institutions" is used to stress that a theory of money alone cannot be fruitfully constructed in an...