This paper proposes a conception of mutual advantage as a motivation for cooperative behaviour. This motivation is contrasted with the 'emotional' reciprocity that is represented in current theories of social preferences. The paper explores parallels between mutual advantage and Humean analyses...

This paper compares two alternative answers to the question, 'Who is the addressee of welfare economics?' These answers correspond with different understandings of the status of the normative conclusions of welfare economics, and have different implications for how welfare economics should be...

Plott and Zeiler (2005) report that the willingness-to-pay/willingness-to-accept disparity is absent for mugs in a particular experimental setting, designed to neutralize misconceptions about the procedures used to elicit valuations. This result has received sustained attention in the...

Standard economic analysis assumes that preferences are independent of markets. However, there is evidence suggesting that price information can influence preferences. We investigate the hypothesis that markets do not simply allow agents to reveal their preferences, but actually help to shape...

We offer an evolutionary model of the emergence of concepts of salience through similarity-based learning. When an individual faces a new decision problem, she chooses an action that she perceives as similar to actions that, when chosen in similar previous problems, led to favourable outcomes....

Previous studies suggest that two otherwise robust 'anomalies' – preference reversals and disparities between buying and selling valuations – are eroded when respondents participate in repeated markets. We report an experiment which investigates whether this is true when factors...

We report an experimental test of level-k theory, applied to three simple games with non-neutral frames: Coordination, Discoordination and Hide and Seek. Using the same frame for all three games, we derive hypotheses that apply across the games and are independent of prior assumptions about...

We propose a new type of cooperative game - a game in transition function (TF) form - as a means of representing social decision making procedures that is suitable for the analysis of rights. The TF form is a generalisation of the effectivity function (EF) form, and in particular it tells us...