The notion of optimality is often invoked informally in the literature on metacognitive control. We provide a precise formulation of the optimization problem and show that optimal time allocation strategies depend critically on certain characteristics of the learning environment, such as the...

Members of different social groups often hold widely divergent public beliefs regarding the nature of the world in which they live. We develop a model that can accommodate such public disagreement, and use it to explore questions concerning the aggregation of distributed information and the...

This paper explores conditions under which inequality across social groups can emerge from initially group-egalitarian distributions and persist across generations despite equality of eco- nomic opportunity. These conditions arise from interactions among three factors: the extent of segregation...