Where genetically unrelated members of a group benefit from mutual adherence to a social norm, agents may obey the norm and punish its violators, even when this behavior cannot be justified in terms of self-regarding, outcome-oriented preferences. We call this strong reciprocity. We distinguish...

Monitoring by peers in work teams, credit associations, partner- ships, local commons situations, and residential neighborhoods is often an effective means of attenuating incentive problems. Most explanations of the incentives to engage in mutual monitoring rely either on small group size or on...

In an electoral framework of unidimensional two-candidate spatial competition with probabilistic voting, special interest groups present candidates with schedules that give the level of campaign contribution they will make for each feasible candidate policy location. Candidates, motivated by the...

A large body of literature documents that returns from currency speculation are highly volatile and possess a predictable component, which is itself highly volatile and serially correlated. Explaining the returns from currency speculation through the presence of a risk premium has proven...

Since the classic work of Feyerabend and Kuhn, the role of social factors in the scientific enterprise has been a major concern in the philosophy and history of science. In particular, the presence of social factors such as the desire for prestige or pressures to conform to accepted ideas, have...

Inefficient delays in trades can sometimes be observed after the arrival of important public news. This paper explains these phenomena with a model in which agents defer trades in the fear that they may be taken advantaged of by better informed trading partners. Under certain conditions, delay...

In the framework of the median voter theorem, an ideologically driven candidate can fully alter policy when running against a vote-maximizing oponent. When turnout is allowed to depend on the relative positioning of the ideal points of the candidates relative to the voter, this result need not...

General equilibrium theory in economics defines the relative prices for goods and services, but does not fix the absolute values of prices. We present a theory of money in which the value of money is a time dependent "strategic variable," to be chosen by the individual agents. The idea is...

The paper generalizes the Kiyotaki-Wright trade model by treating the trading period as a finite game, so Nash's theorem can be used to prove the existence of equilibrium, and by treating the economy as a Markov process, so an ergodic theorem can be used to show the existence of equilibria with...

Many of the applications of game theory have been to economics where the individuals under study are assumed to be maximizing profits or Òutility'' or some other conventional economic goal of Òstatus.'' Loosely stated we think of status as one's position in a society compared with others,...