The purpose of this paper is to explain the main social and economic facts concerning obesity in a way that substantially improves upon existing economic theory. In contrast to existing theory, a number of recent health science writers have explained persuasively that weight gain or loss is not...

We study costless pre-play communication of intentions among inexperienced players. Using the level-k model of strategic thinking to describe players' beliefs, we fully characterize the effects of pre-play communication in symmetric 2×2 games. One-way communication weakly increases coordination...