better understand when mixed equilibria might arise within populations of interact acting agents, we examine a model of smoothed fictitious play that is designed to capture Harsanyi's "Purification", view of mixed equilibria in a setting with a large population of agents. Our analysis concerns...

We examine the competition between a group of Internet retailers who operate in an environment where a price search engine plays a dominant role. We show that for some products in this environment, the easy price search makes demand tremendously price-sensitive. Retailers, though, engage in...

This paper examines a model in which advertisers bid for "sponsored-link" positions on a search engine. The value advertisers derive from each position is endogenized as coming from sales to a population of consumers who make rational inferences about firm qualities and search optimally....

This paper studies whether agents must agglomerate at a single location in a class of models of two-sided interaction. In these models there is an increasing returns effect that favors agglomeration, but also a crowding or market-impact effect that makes agents prefer to be in a market with...

A large literature following Hirsch (2005) has proposed citation- based indexes of individuals' research output. This paper views Hirsch's index as one member of a larger class and examines how well different indexes align with labor market outcomes for young, tenured economists at 50 US...

This paper explores differences in the frequency with which students from different schools reach high levels of math achievement. Data from the American Mathematics Competitions is used to produce counts of high-scoring students from more than two thousand public, coeducational, non-magnet,...

This paper explores differences in the frequency with which students from different schools reach high levels of math achievement. Data from the American Mathematics Competitions is used to produce counts of high-scoring students from more than two thousand public, coeducational, non-magnet,...

This paper studies the way that word-of-mouth communication aggregates the information of individual agents. We find that the structure of the communication process determines whether all agents end up making identical choices, with less communication making this conformity more likely. Despite...

This paper studies the effect of randomness in per-period matching on the long-run outcome of non-equilibrium adaptive processes. If there are many matchings between each strategy revision, the randomness due to matching will be small; our question is when a very small noise due to matching has...