Professional experts offer advice with the objective of appearing well informed. Their ability is evaluated on the basis of the advice given and the realized state of the world. We model this situation as a reputational cheap-talk game with continuous signal, state, and ability type spaces....

We offer a model in which sequences of individuals often converge upon poor decisions and are prone to fads, despite being able to communicate both past payoff outcomes and the private signals underlying past choices. This reflects direct and indirect action-based informational externalities;...

Recently, the theory of informational cascades has been tested in an experiment by Anderson and Holt (1997) who report that their data support the theory amazingly well. In this note we report on an experiment designed to find out whether observed cascades are indeed due to rational Bayesian...

The recent literature on informational cascades has nurtured the impression that cascades can occur only if the action space is coarser than the signal space. In particular, it is sometimes claimed that with continuous action spaces cascades are impossible. In this note we present a simple...

The paper uses the recently available data on growth rates, democracy, protectionism, and wars over the period 1820 to 2000 to look at the determinants of economic growth over the long-term. It is motivated by the following questions: what is the effect of democracy on growth, was colonialism...

Despite the shortcomings of Hayek’s spontaneous order, there is a positive side, perhaps even a positive feedback. Hayek left us with a “what if” question and returns us to that initial opening of Pandora’s Box, or perhaps the initial onset of neo-realism, neo-liberalism,...

Based on an original database, this paper provides an empirical study of Tsarist bond prices reactions after their repudiation by the Soviets. For the two years following the repudiation two striking features of a representative Tsarist bond traded in Paris are highlighted: first, the price...

An imperative need has arisen to provide a Constructive push to the President Bush. American population, Corporate units, Expatriates and all nations with their currency related to US $, are not happy in the current $ dipping situation. Even the currencies of poor nations are galloping upward in...

In this paper, I present and discuss a method for modelling an important trade-off faced by terrorism prevention policies: the trade-off between, on the one hand, trying to reduce people's inclination towards terrorism, and, on the other hand, trying to protect society against existing...