Monitoring by peers is often an effective means of attenuating incentive problems. Most explanations of the efficacy of mutual monitoring rely either on small group size or on a version of the Folk theorem with repeated interactions which requires reasonably accurate public information...

A number of outstanding puzzles in economics may be resolved by recognizing that where members of a group benefit from mutual adherence to a social norm, agents may obey the norm and punish its violators, even when this behavior cannot be motivated by self-regarding, outcome-oriented...

Many of the applications of game theory have been to economics where the individuals under study are assumed to be maximizing profits or Òutility'' or some other conventional economic goal of Òstatus.'' Loosely stated we think of status as one's position in a society compared with others,...

In Part I we provide a heuristic discussion of the motivation for the investigation of games of status. Here we confine our remarks to several alternative formulations of games of status and to exploring the relationship between these games and the class of simple games, in part using the...