We construct a dynamic theory of civil conflict hinging on inter-ethnic trust and trade. The model economy is inhabitated by two ethnic groups. Inter-ethnic trade requires imperfectly observed bilateral investments and one group has to form beliefs on the average propensity to trade of the other...

Housing markets are subject to many interrelated sources of instability on both a microeconomic and macroeconomic scale. Housing decisions of different individuals will be interdependent, generating non-linearities, discontinuities and feedback effects. This paper focuses in on some behavioural...

Psychological and sociological factors constrain economic decision-making in many contexts including the online world. Behavioural economics and economic psychology emphasise that people will make mistakes in processing information and in planning for the future; these mistakes will also distort...

Experimental analyses have identified significant tendencies for individuals to follow herd decisions, a finding which has been explained using Bayesian principles. This paper outlines the results from a herding task designed to extend these analyses using evidence from a functional magnetic...

In this paper, the political dilemma of the deployment of a large-size low carbon technology (LCT) is analyzed. A simple dynamic model is developed to analyze the interrelation between irreversible investments and learning-by-doing within a context of exogenous uncertainty on carbon price....

The main research question in this paper is whether the installation rate of solar pv technology is affected by social spillovers from spatially close households. The installed base, defined as the cumulative number of solar v installations within a neighbourhood by the end of a particular...

This paper proposes a dynamic model of bargaining to analyze decentralized markets where buyers and sellers obtain information about past deals through their social network. There is a unique equilibrium outcome which depends crucially on the peripheral (least connected) individuals in each...

Confirmation bias refers to cognitive errors that bias one towards one's own prior beliefs. A vast empirical literature documents its existence and psychologists identify it as one of the most problematic aspects of human reasoning. In this paper, we present three related scenarios where...

This paper considers the impact of reviewers on the sale of a product of unknown quality. Sales occur simultaneously after an initial review by an unbiased, pessimistic or optimistic reviewer and we examine the impact on sales in each case. We find that counter-intuitively a pessimistic reviewer...

Experience gained in a workplace characterised by decision-making and learning-by-doing is modelled via a process of signal accumulation under several different frameworks. We initially look at the probability of success based on uninterrupted signal accumulation, then consider the impact of...