Although evidence accrues in biology, anthropology and experimental economics that homo sapiens is a cooperative species, the reigning assumption in economic theory is that individuals optimize in an autarkic manner (as in Nash and Walrasian equilibrium). I here postulate an interdependent kind...

Although evidence accrues in biology, anthropology and experimental economics that homo sapiens is a cooperative species, the reigning assumption in economic theory is that individuals optimize in an autarkic manner (as in Nash and Walrasian equilibrium). I here postulate a cooperative kind of...

This paper solves for the set of equilibrium payoffs in bargaining with interdependent values when the informed party makes all offers, as discounting vanishes. The seller of a good is informed of its quality, which affects both his cost and the buyer's valuation, but the buyer is not. To...

We introduce grading into games of status. Each player chooses effort, pro­ducing a stochastic output or score. Utilities depend on the ranking of all the scores. By clustering scores into grades, the ranking is coarsened, and the incen­tives to work are changed.We apply games of status to...

We introduce grading into games of status. Each player chooses effort, producing a stochastic output or score. Utilities depend on the ranking of all the scores. By clustering scores into grades, the ranking is coarsened, and the incentives to work are changed. We first apply games of status to...

Status is greatly valued in the real world, yet it has not received much attention from economic theorists. We examine how the owner of a firm can best combine money and status to get her employees to work hard for the least total cost. We find that she should motivate workers of low skill...

Money is a mystery and financial institutions are often regarded as guardians and promoters of the mystery. These sketches are designed to help an individual interested in, but not technically trained in economics, understand markets, money, credit and the evolution of a mass market system...

We take an equilibrium-based approach to study the interplay between behavior and misperceptions in coordination games with assortative interactions. Our focus is assortativity neglect, where agents fail to take into account the extent of assortativity in society. We show, first, that...

We study to what extent information aggregation in social learning environments is robust to slight misperceptions of others' characteristics (e.g., tastes or risk attitudes). We consider a population of agents who obtain information about the state of the world both from initial private signals...

Money is a mystery and financial institutions are often regarded as guardians and promoters of the mystery. These sketches are designed to help any reader interested in, but not technically trained in economics, understand markets, money, credit and the evolution of a mass market system set in...