Using life cycle publication data of 9,368 economics PhD graduates from 127 U.S. institutions, we investigate how unemployment in the U.S. economy prior to starting graduate studies and at the time of entry into the academic job market affect economics PhD graduates' research productivity. We...

In all social and economic interactions, individuals or coalitions choose not only with whom to interact but how to interact, and over time both the structure (the with whom) and the strategy (the how) of interactions change. Our objectives here are to model the structure and strategy of...

We make four main contributions to the theory of network formation. (1) The problem of network formation with farsighted agents can be formulated as an abstract network formation game. (2) In any farsighted network formation game the feasible set of networks contains a unique, finite, disjoint...

This paper studies a decentralised job market model where firms (academic departments) propose sequentially a (unique) position to some workers (Ph.D. candidates). Successful candidates then decide whether to accept the offers, and departments whose positions remain unfilled propose to other...

In has been frequently observed, in both economics and psychology, that individuals tend to conform to the choices of other individuals with whom thy identify. Can such conformity be consistent with self-interested behaviour? To address this question we use the framework of games with incomplete...

In the literature of psychology and economics it is frequently observed that individuals tend to imitate similar individuals. A fundamental question is whether the outcome of such imitation can be consistent with self-interested behaviour. We propose that this consistency requires the existence...

Motivated by issues of imitation, learning and evolution, we introduce a framework of non-co-operative games, allowing both countable sets of pure actions and player types and player types and demonstrate that for all games with sufficiently many players, every mixed strategy Nash equilibrium...

Interpret a set of players all playing the same pure strategy and all with similar attributes as a society. Is it consistent with self interested behaviour for a population to organise itself into a relatively small number of societies? In a companion paper we characterised how large e must be,...