An acceleration in the growth of communications bandwidth in use and a rapid reduction in bandwidth prices have not accompanied the U.S. economy’s strong performance in the second half of the 1990s. Overall U.S. bandwidth in use has grown robustly throughout the 1990s, but growth has not...

In the deliberations of scholars, policy analysts, and policy makers, television has exceptional power and influence. Yet the historical record shows that television has not changed the economics of attention for large populations in the course of their daily lives. By the mid- 1920s, print...

Suppose an altruistic person, A, is willing to transfer resources to a second person, B, if B comes upon hard times. If B anticipates that A will act in this manner, B will save too little from both agents' point of view. This is the Samaritan's dilemma. The logic of the dilemma has been...

This paper models aid agencies as financial intermediaries that do not make a financial return to depositors, since the depositors' concern is to transfer resources to investor-beneficiaries. This leads to a significant problem of verification of the agencies' activities. One solution to this...

We derive discrete markov chain approximations for continuous state equilibrium term structure models. The states and transition probabilities of the markov chain are chosen effciently according to a quadrature rule as in Tauchen and Hussey (1991). Quadrature provides a simple yet method which...

The type function of an agent, in a type space, associates with each state a probability distribution on the type space. Thus, a type function can be considered as a Markov chain on the state space. A common prior for the space turns out to be a probability distribution which is invariant under...

What modern game theorists describe as 'fictitious play' is not the learning process George W. Brown defined in his 1951 paper. His original version differs in a subtle detail, namely the order of belief updating. In this note we revive Brown's original fictitious play process and demonstrate...

Fictitious play is the classical myopic learning process, and games with strategic complementarities are an important class of games including many economic applications. Knowledge about convergence properties of fictitious play in this class of games is scarce, however. Beyond dominance...