For forty years area-based initiatives (ABIs) were the primary tool used by UK governments to tackle problems of concentrated deprivation and dereliction. The last decade saw these initiatives end, replaced by new forms of city-wide or region-wide governance: Local Strategic Partnerships in...

Aspiration-based evolutionary dynamics have recently been used to model the evolution of fair play in the ultimatum game showing that incredible threats to reject low offers persist in equilibrium. We focus on two extensions of this analysis: we experimentally test whether assumptions about...

Recently economists have become interested in why people who face social dilemmas in the experimental lab use the seemingly incredible threat of punishment to deter free riding. Three theories with evolutionary microfoundations have been developed to explain punishment. We survey these theories...

We give a Markov chain that converges to its stationary distribution very slowly. It has the form of a Gibbs sampler running on a posterior distribution of a parameter [theta] given data X. Consequences for Gibbs sampling are discussed.

The current austerity in the UK public finances is having knock-on effects for the Scottish Government. Public servants in Scotland talk of the ‘scissors of doom’ – of rising demand for public services and falling revenue expenditure. In response to these pressures the...