The ultimatum game is (in)famous for its `anomalies': The outcomes of laboratory experiments are very different from the results generated by traditional game theory. This paper aims to find to what extent these discrepancies between theory and experiments can be explained by the effects of...

This paper considers a dynamic matching model with imperfectly observable worker effort as in Shapiro and Stiglitz (1994). In our economy the no-shirking condition endogenously imposes real wage rigidity on the matching market. This generates "contractual fragility" and inefficient separations...

As Posner (1997) has observed, when individuals in a relationship can commit to imposing costs upon each other then efficient behavior in the absence of law is possible. The question is whether efficient norms of behavior evolve endogenously in a population. We show that in a standard hold up...

Combining two or more items and selling them as one good, a practice called bundling, can be a very effective strategy for reducing the costs of producing, marketing, and selling goods. In this paper, we design a system for a shop, to negotiate both the contents and the price of bundles of goods...

We have developed an agent-based computational model, extension of an analytical model1 that studies the structure of coalitions of B-to-C web sites, when Internet buyers incur search costs for finding the good that matches their preferences, and coalitions of sites reduce this cost through...

While under recursive least squares learning the dynamics of the economy converges to rational expectations equilibria (REE) which are E–stable, some recent examples propose that E–stability is not a sufficient condition for learnability. In this paper, we provide some further...

We examine optimal policy in an open-economy model with uncertainty and learning, where monetary policy actions affect the economy through the real exchange rate channel. Our results show that the degree of caution or activism in optimal policy depends on whether central banks are in coordinated...

We provide sufficient conditions and necessary conditions for stability of an economy under structural mixed recursive least squares/stochastic gradient heterogeneous learning of agents with possibly different degrees of inertia. We have found a unifying condition which is sufficient for...

In this paper we perform an in—depth investigation of relative merits of two adaptive learning algorithms with constant gain, Recursive Least Squares (RLS) and Stochastic Gradient (SG), using the Phelps model of monetary policy as a testing ground. The behavior of the two learning...

In this paper we explore the information processing problem of the firm by modeling the firm as type of network, which is comprised of two kinds of agents, 'searchers' and 'managers.' The searchers explore the external environment and report the information to the managers. We explore the role...