Experimentalists frequently claim that human subjects playing games in the laboratory violate such solution concepts as Nash equilibrium and subgame perfection. This claim is premature. What has been rejected are certain joint hypotheses about preferences, knowledge, and behavior. This note...

The Pareto dominance relation is shown to be the unique nontrivial partial order on the set of finite-dimensional real vectors satisfying a number of intuitive properties.

This paper investigates the relationship between happiness (utility) and a host of socio-economic variables. The data set consists of a random sample of over 5,000 individuals from the Swedish adult population. Happiness is measured by a three-point categorical measure of overall happiness (not...

In the models of Young (1993a, b), boundedly rational individuals are recurrently matched to play a game, and they play myopic best replies to the recent history of play. It could therefore be an advantage to instead play a myiopic best reply to the myopic best reply, something boundedly...

This paper surveys the literature on group selection. I describe the early contributions and the group selection controversy. I also describe the main approaches to group selection in the recent literature; fixation, assortative group formation, and reproductive externalities.

Many previous experiments document that behavior in multi-person settings responds to the name of the game and the labeling of strategies. Usually these studies cannot tell whether frames affect preferences or beliefs. In this Dictator game study, we investigate whether social framing effects...

We find that contrary to common perception, cooperation as equilibrium of the infinitely repeated discounted prisoner's dilemma is in many relevant cases not very plausible, or at least questionable: for a significant subset of the payoff-discount factor parameter space cooperation equilibria...

Why do money and markets crowd out cooperative relations? This paper characterizes the effects of intertemporal preferences, money, and markets on players' ability to cooperate in material-payoff supergames. Players' aversion to intertemporal substitution facilitates cooperation by decreasing...

In this paper I define an evolutionary stability criterion for learning rules. Using Monte Carlo simulations, I then apply this criterion to a class of learning rules that can be represented by Camerer and Ho's (1999) model of learning. This class contains perturbed versions of reinforcement and...

This is a dictionary entry forthcoming in Peter Newman, ed. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law, London: Macmillan, 1998.