Inflated retail prices and termination rates for international telecommunications have spawned traffic re-routing practices, including call turnaround (e.g., callback) and re-origination via third countries. The US and other liberalized countries that allow telecom competition favor such...

A characteristic of many bargaining situations is that the negotiators represents the interests of a set of parties (trade unions, political parties, etc.) with composite interests, whose bargaining behaviour is regulated by some collective decision mechanism. In this paper we provide a natural...

We analyze the BBC TV game show "The Weakest Link", using data from 77 episodes, covering 13,380 questions. We focus on the banking decision, where a contestant chooses to secure an amount of money for the eventual winner, or to risk it on a general knowledge question. In the latter case, should...

Agent heterogeneity has been used in recent economic literature to justify nonlinear dynamics for the time paths of aggregate economic variables. In this paper, the mechanism through which heterogeneous agents leads to chaotic motion is explained. Adding to a system with initial behavior...

Research activities have uncertain outcomes. The question asked in this paper is whether or not this uncertainty can be a central piece on the explanation of long run consumption growth paths. More specifically, we inquire how the existence of different research projects, with different degrees...

Monetary policy has an important role in the determination of the inflation rate and the output gap time trajectories. Monetary authorities should choose the nominal interest rate time path that best serves the goals of price stability (primarily) and output growth (as a consequence of the...

This paper introduces a psychological notion of categorization into economics and derives its implications for economic decision making. We show, using a tractable model of social cognition, that a decision maker in (efficiently) assigning past experiences to categories, will sort experiences of...

We analyze different ways of pairing agents in a bipartite matching problem, with regard to its scaling properties and to the distribution of individual ``satisfactions''. Then we explore the role of partial information and bounded rationality in a generalized {\it Marriage Problem}, comparing...

The paper provides an brief overview of the “state of the art” in the theory of rational decision making since the 1950’s, and focuses specially on the evolutionary justification of rationality. It is claimed that this justification, and more generally the economic methodology inherited...