Jewish emancipation in nineteenth century Europe produced drastically different responses.  In Germany, a liberal variant known as Reform developed, while ultra-Orthodox Judaism emerged in eastern Europe.  We develop a model of religious organization which explains this polarization.  In...

Party activists wish to (i) advocate the best policy and yet (ii) unify behind a common party line. An activist`s understanding of his environment is based on the speeches of party leaders. A leader`s influence, measured by the weight placed on her speech, increases with her judgement on policy...

We construct an equilibrium random matching model of the labour market, with endogenous market participation and a general matching technology that allows for market size effects: the job-finding rate for workers and the incentives for participation change with the level of unemployment. In...

This paper is a first step toward closing the analytical gap in the extensive literature on the results of interactions between public and private R&D expenditures, and their joint effects on the economy. A survey focusing on econometric studies in this area reveals a plethora of sometimes...

This paper studies a game of strategic experimentation with two-armed bandits whose risky arm might yield a payoff only after some exponentially distributed random time. Because of free-riding, there is an inefficiently low level of experimentation in any equilibrium where the players use...

In a collective-action game a player`s payoff is the sum of (i) a private component that depends only on that player`s action, and (ii) a public component, common to all players and dependent upon all actions. A classic application is the private provision of a public good. Play evolves:...

The volunteer`s dilemma is an asymmetric n-player binary-action game in which a public good is provided if and only if at least one player volunteers, and consequently bears some private cost. So long as the value generated for every player exceeds this private cost there are n pure-strategy...