We construct a simple firm-based automata model for global economic inter-dependence of countries using modern notions of self-organized criticality and recently developed dynamical-renormalization-group methods (e.g., L. Pietronero et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 72(11):1690 (1994); J. Hasty and K....

We construct a simple firm-based model of global interdependence. We show how extremely strong statistical correlations can naturally develop between countries even if the interconnections between those countries remain very weak. Potential policy implications of this result are also discussed.

This paper presents the results of an impact evaluation, with an experimental design, which estimates the effect on learning math of a remote tutoring program offered to girls and boys aged 9-14 years in three departments of El Salvador. The program used low-tech interventions such as text...

This paper presents the results of an impact evaluation, with an experimental design, which estimates the effect on learning math of a remote tutoring program offered to girls and boys aged 9-14 years in three departments of El Salvador. The program used low-tech interventions such as text...

Which of the democratic checks and balances - opposition parties, the judiciary, a free press -is the most critical? Peru has the full set of democratic institutions. In the 1990s, the secret-police chief Vladimiro Montesinos systematically undermined them all with bribes. We quantify the checks...

On the Internet it is easy for someone to obtain a new identity. This introduces opportunities to misbehave without paying reputational consequences. A large degree of cooperation can still emerge, through a convention in which newcomers ``pay their dues'' by accepting poor treatment from...

In this paper we study consistency in the context of additive cost sharing mechanisms. We contrast an extremely weak notion of consistency with the standard definition, which we denote strong consistency. First we show that many well known CSMs are consistent in both senses: Aumann-Shapley,...

In this paper we study a large class of non-atomic games arising from interactions on the Internet, such as many users sharing a network link, researchers accessing a database or web server, subscribers to a network services provider trying to gain access to the modem pool and many more. We...

We provide several new characterizations of well known cost sharing methods (CSMs) as maxima of linear (or convex) functionals. For the Shapley-Shubik method the characterization has an interpretation in terms of randomly ordered agents choosing their most preferred CSM, while the...

We consider the social norms of repeated matching games in the presence of finite probability trembles and show that such norms must be subgame perfect along the equilibrium path but need not be subgame perfect off the equilibrium path. This is consistent with the well known experimental results...