Consider a population of farmers who live around a lake. Each farmer engages in trade with his two adjacent neighbors. The trade is governed by a prisoner's dilemma "rule of engagement". A farmer's payoff is the sum of the payoffs from the two prisoner's dilemma games played with his two...

Consider a population of farmers who live around a lake. Each farmer engages in trade with his m adjacent neighbors, where m is termed the "span of interaction". Trade is governed by a prisoner's dilemma "rule of engagement". A farmer's payoff is the sum of the payoffs from the m prisoner's...

In a haystack-type representation of a heterogeneous population that is evolving according to a payoff structure of a prisoner's dilemma game, migration is modeled as a process of swappingʺ individuals between heterogeneous groups of constant size after a random allocation fills the haystacks,...

This paper asks whether population growth is conducive to the sustainability of cooperation. A simple model is developed in which farmers who live around a circular lake engage in trade with their adjacent neighbors. The payoffs from this activity are governed by a prisoner's dilemma "rule of...

Following Sen's (1973) characterization of the Gini coefficient as a ratio between a measure of aggregate income-based stress ("depression" in Sen's terminology) and aggregate income, we transform the Gini coefficient into a social welfare function rather than having the Gini coefficient feature...

I study attitudes towards risk taking in cases where a person relates to others positively, namely altruistically. This study is needed because it is unclear how altruism influences the inclination of an altruistic person to take risks. Will this person's risk-taking behavior differ if the...

This paper considers a setting in which the acquisition of human capital entails a change of location in social space that causes individuals to revise their comparison groups. Skill levels are viewed as occupational groups, and moving up the skill ladder by acquiring additional human capital,...

For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. This contrasts sharply with another salient feature of the Chinese land policy reform landscape that has gone on largely unnoticed - the addition of newly cultivated land in China through land...