Rational choice theory stretches out in two complementary directions. Its contextual and extensive application fills and then overflows the strict domain of substantive economy, eventually identifying any human choice with an economic decision. Its structural and intensive sophistication...

In a model of evolution driven by conflict between societies more powerful states have an advantage. When the influence of outsiders is small we show that this results in a tendency to hegemony. In a simple example in which institutions differ in their "exclusiveness" we find that these...

We develop a general method to solve models of interactions between multiple agents, including the possibility of strategic advantage for some of them. We argue that this type of model applies to the description of apparently irrational or biased behaviors in a person whose action is the...

These couple of pages discuss upon the retroactive influence (Systemic Retroactive game, or SyR) between people’s behaviour and environment. The latter is intended as physical environment (type of cities, climate, geography…), normative environment (laws), moral environment (religions,...

The value of information is examined in a single-agent environment with unawareness. Although the agent has a correct prior about events he is aware of and has a clear understanding of his available actions and payoffs, his unawareness may lead him to commit information processing errors and to...

We conduct a laboratory experiment with a constant-sum sender–receiver game and a sequential game of matching pennies with the same payoff structure to investigate the impact of individuals’ first- and second-order beliefs on truth-telling. While first-movers in matching pennies choose an...

Until the beginning of 1950s, the economic theory in general, and the microeconomic theory in particular, relied totally on the deterministic character of economic phenomena. Nowadays microeconomic models are built on uncertain elements in a competitive environment that is affected by risk and...

Characterizations of the choice functions that select the cores or the externally stable cores induced by an underlying revealed dominance digraph are provided. Relying on such characterizations, the basic order-theoretic structure of the corresponding sets of revealed cores is also analyzed

This paper provides an argument for the advantage of a preference for identity-consistent behaviour from an evolutionary point of view. Within a stylised model of social interaction, we show that the development of cooperative social norms is greatly facilitated if the agents of the society...

Different to other scientific disciplines traditional economic theory has remained remarkably silent about procedural aspects of strategic interactions. Much to the contrast, among psychologists there is by now a broad consensus that not only expected outcomes shape human behavior, but also...