Substantial evidence has accumulated in recent empirical works on the limited ability of the Nash equilibrium to rationalize observed behavior in many classes of games played by experimental subjects. This realization has led to several attempts aimed at finding tractable equilibrium concepts...

Conformity behavior, i.e. the agreement between an individual's choices and the prevailing behavior of a reference group, is a commonly observed phenomenon. Though some types of social interactions may give raise to specific incentives to adopt either a majoritarian or a contrarian behavior, we...

Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...

I investigate the consequences of long-run persistence of a societies’ preference towards cultural goods. Historical cultural activity is approximated with the frequency of births of classical composers during the Renaissance and is linked with contemporary supply of cultural activities in...

Conformity behavior, i.e., the agreement between an individual’s choices and the prevailing behavior of a reference group, is a commonly observed phenomenon. Though some types of social interactions may give raise to specific incentives to adopt either a majoritarian or a contrarian behavior,...

We discuss the two-way link between culture and economic growth. We present a model of endogenous technical change where growth is driven by the innovative activity of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is risky and requires investments that affect the steepness of the lifetime consumption profile....

This note is an answer to a previous model on conformity in public goods contributions developed by Carpenter (2004), where a population evolution is allowed according to the standard replicator dynamic (Taylor and Jonker, 1978; Maynard Smith, 1982). To confirm his theoretical prediction, Carpenter...

We repeatedly elicited individuals? Willingness to Accept (WTA) evaluations for an auctioned bad in an experimental setting in which truthful revelation is the (weakly) dominant strategy. We investigate whether the observation of supposedly irrelevant signals (the market price, the asks at...

We repeatedly elicited individuals' Willingness to Accept (WTA) evaluations for an auctioned bad in an experimental setting in which truthful revelation is the (weakly) dominant strategy. We investigate whether the observation of supposedly irrelevant signals (the market price, the asks at...