This research explores the origins of loss aversion and the variation in its prevalence across regions, nations and ethnic group. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that the evolution of loss aversion in the course of human history can be traced to the adaptation of...

This research explores the economic causes and consequences of language structures. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that variations in pre-industrial geographical characteristics that were conducive to higher return to agricultural investment, larger gender gap in...

The subject of this paper is how the epistemic limitations of individuals and their biases in reasoning affect collective decisions and in particular the functioning of democracies. In fact, while the cognitive sciences have largely shown how the imperfections of human rationality shape...

This paper traces the 11,000 year evolution of infrastructure systems during major periods of innovation, expansion and diffusion. Throughout history, the key role of the State is self-evident. Private sector involvement has waxed and waned over millennia, although at times it has been pivotal...

This paper considers a dynamic model of the evolution of open source software projects, focusing on the evolution of quality, contributing programmers, and users who contribute customer support to other users. Programmers who have used open source software are motivated by reciprocal altruism to...

In fiscal interaction, a policy is evolutionarily stable if, once adopted by all governments, jurisdictions that deviate from it fare worse than those that stick to it. Evolutionary stability is the appropriate solution concept for models of imitative learning (policy mimicking). We show that...

We introduce a generalized theoretical approach to study imitation models and subject themodels to rigorous experimental testing. In our theoretical analysis we find that the differentpredictions of previous imitation models are due to different informational assumptions, notto different...

Corporate success stories often resemble a snowball. We show how initial luck in hiring talented people, the resulting technological advantage, superior corporate culture, and statusseeking by workers and by consumers can make small initial differences generate large differences over time.

We consider the evolution of preferences when trade occurs between two countries. We show that if one country is much larger than the other, its preferences can eventually take over the preferences of the second country. This result may provide an explanation of why small countries sometimes...