Better forecasts of decisions in conflict situations, such as occur in business, politics, and war, can help protagonists achieve better outcomes. It is common advice to “stand in the other person’s shoes” when involved in a conflict, a procedure we refer to as “role thinking.” We...

In their seminal work, The Calculus of Consent (1962), Buchanan and Tullock develop a decision model which embodies fundamental relation­ships relevant to institutional choices. However, the Buchanan-Tullock model remains "general," thus inviting others to specify details and to develop...

This study reports an experiment that examines whether groups can better comply with theoretical predictions than individuals in contests. Our experiment replicates previous findings that individual players significantly overbid relative to theoretical predictions, incurring substantial losses....

The goal of this paper is to model an agent who dislikes large choice sets because of the "cost of thinking" involved in choosing from them. We take as a primitive a preference relation over lotteries of menus and impose novel axioms that allow us to separately identify the genuine preference...

In this paper we test a particular variant of the (Repulsive) Particle Swarm method on some rather difficult global optimization problems. A number of these problems are collected from the extant literature and a few of them are newly introduced. First, we introduce the Particle Swarm method of...

One of the main achievements of Herbert A. Simon in organizational theory is analytically evaluating the psychology of individual and collective behavior thus opening the ground for further research D. Kahneman, and T. Schelling. This article provides an assessment of the contributions of...

We study games where voluntary contributions can be adjusted until a steady state is found. In consent games contributions start at zero and can be increased by consent, and in dissent games contributions start high and can be decreased by dissent. Equilibrium analysis predicts free riding in...

We study a market model in which competing firms use costly marketing devices to influence the set of alternatives which consumers perceive as relevant. Consumers in our model are boundedly rational in the sense that they have an imperfect perception of what is relevant to their decision...

This paper studies market competition when firms can influence consumers' ability to compare market alternatives, through their choice of price "formats". We introduce random graphs as a tool for modelling limited comparability of formats. Our main results concern the interaction between firms'...

This paper discusses a common criticism of economic models that depart from the standard rational-choice paradigm - namely, that the phenomena addressed by such models can be "rationalized" by some standard model. I criticize this criterion for evaluating bounded-rationality models. Using a...