During the recent sales of UMTS licenses in Europe some countries used auctions while others resorted to so-called Beauty Contests. There seems to be a wide consensus among economists that in these and other contexts like privatisation an auction is the better selling mechanism. However, why...

We develop a new model of the intergenerational transmission of culture based on the labor market characteristics of different cultural types. Following Borjas (1994,1995) we assume that cultural heterogeneity increases labor productivity due to skill complementarities, however following Jackson...

Economists long considered money illusion to be largely irrelevant. Here we show, however, that money illusion has powerful effects on equilibrium selection. If we represent payoffs in nominal terms, choices converge to the Pareto inefficient equilibrium; however, if we lift the veil of money by...

In this paper we model the interaction between leaders, their followers and crowd followers in a coordination game with local interaction. The steady states of a dynamic best-response process can feature a coexistence of Pareto dominant and risk dominant actions in the population. The existence...

We study whether one reason behind female underrepresentation in leadership is that female leaders are less effective at coordinating action by followers. Two experiments using coordination games investigate whether female leaders are less successful than males in persuading followers to...