This paper studies dynamic, endogenous institutional change. We introduce the class of dynamic political games (DPGs), dynamic games in which future political aggregation rules are decided under current ones, and the resulting institutional choices do not affect payoffs or technology directly. A...

We investigate the role that self-control problems modeled as time-inconsistent, present-biased preferences and a person's awareness of those problems might play in leading people to develop and maintain harmful addictions. Present-biased preferences create a tendency to over-consume addictive...

Con questo articolo si intende offrire una rassegna critica del dibattito in corso da più di un decennio sul concetto di capitale sociale. Gli studi considerati sono suddivisi in base all’aspetto della struttura sociale cui di volta in volta viene accordata maggiore enfasi. La rassegna si...

Market clearing is the central issue in macroeconomics. Two centuries of debate on Say’s Law indicates that the issue is not yet settled. This essay proposes that double coincidence is a necessary condition for market clearing, in addition to the equality of demand and supply at equilibrium...

For groups that must make several decisions of similar form, we define a simple and general mechanism that is designed to promote social efficiency. The mechanism links the various decisions by forcing agents to budget their representations of preferences so that the frequency of preferences...

This paper studies the role of memory and communication in games between ongoing organizations. In each organization, each individual, upon entry into the game, replaces his predecessor who has the same preferences and faces the same strategic possibilities. Entry across distinct organizations...

In the model of Funaki and Yamato (1999) the tragedy of the commons can be avoided with pessimistic players, while this does not hold for optimistic players. We propose a new core concept to overcome this puzzle and provide numerical simulations of simple games where the conclusions coincide or...

We present a general model of two players contest with two types of efforts. Contrary to the classical models of contest, where each player chooses a unique effort, and where the outcome depends on the efforts of all the players, contestants are allowed to reduce the effort of the opponent....

Recent models of procrastination due to self-control problems assume that a procrastinator considers just one option and is unaware of her self-control problems. We develop a model where a person chooses from a menu of options and is partially aware of her self-control problems. This menu model...

We define the canonical form of a cost spanning tree problem. The canonical form has the property that reducing the cost of any arc, the minimal cost of connecting agents to the source is also reduced. We argue that the canonical form is a relevant concept in this kind of problems and study a...