The Industrial Revolution was characterized by technological progress and an increasing capital intensity. Why did real wages stagnate or fall in the beginning? I answer this question by modeling the Industrial Revolution as the introduction of a relatively more capital intensive production...

In this paper we view bargaining and cooperation as an interaction superimposed on a strategic form game. A multistage bargaining procedure for N players, the “proposer commitment” procedure, is presented. It is inspired by Nash’s two-player variable-threat model; a key feature is the...

Dubey and Geanakoplos [2002] have developed a theory of competitive pooling, which incorporates adverse selection and signaling into general equilibrium. By recasting the Rothschild-Stiglitz model of insurance in this framework, they find that a separating equilibrium always exists and is...

This article examines the debt history of two contenders for European hegemony: 16th-century Spain and 18th-century Britain. We analyze their fiscal behavior using measures of overborrowing and fiscal policy functions. Our results suggest that stringency was not key for Britain’s success in...

This paper studies empirical facts regarding the effects of unexpected changes in aggregate macroeconomic fiscal policies on consumers that are allowed to differ depending on their individual characteristics. We use data from the Consumption Expenditure Survey (CEX) to estimate individual-level...

We extend Aumann's [3] theorem, deriving correlated equilibria as a consequence of common priors and common knowledge of rationality, by explicitly allowing for non-rational behavior. We replace the assumption of common knowledge of rationality with a substantially weaker one, joint p-belief of...

We study an interactive framework that explicitly allows for non-rational behavior. We do not place any restrictions on how players can deviate from rational behavior. Instead we assume that there exists a lower bound p E [0,1] such that all players play and are believed to play rationally with...

Economic predictions are highly sensitive to model and informational specifications. Weinstein and Yildiz (2007) show that, in static games with incomplete information, only very weak predictions, namely, the interim correlated rationalizable (ICR) actions, are robust to higher-order belief...

We introduce a model of strategic thinking in games of initial response. Unlike standard models of strategic thinking, in this framework the player's "depth of reasoning" is endogenously determined, and it can be disentangled from his beliefs over his opponent's cognitive bound. In our approach,...

We compare behavior in modified dictator games with and without role uncertainty. Subjects choose between a selfish action, a costly surplus creating action (altruistic behavior) and a costly surplus destroying action (spiteful behavior). While costly surplus creating actions are the most...