This paper analyzes the contribution of youth's different time allocations to positive behaviours in exchanges. In particular the psychological literature states that spending time within youth voluntary organizations fosters positive development of the young more than hanging out with friends....

Representative democracy consists of a chain of delegation from voters to the executive and a corresponding chain of accountability, with some questions (particularly constitutional questions) reserved for popular vote. This structure reflects the high transaction costs of coordinating...

We suggest that the promise of blockchains is to be found not merely in the more proximate fact that they are immutable ledgers, but the broader impact that comes from blockchains as a template for mutable design. We discuss mechanism design theory to suggest where blockchains may or may not be...

Many facts are learned through the intermediation of individuals with special access to information, such as law enforcement officers, officials with a security clearance, or experts with specific knowledge. This paper considers whether societies can learn about such facts when information is...

We review the vast literature on social preferences by assessing what is known about their fundamental properties, their distribution in the broader population, and their consequences for important economic and political behaviors. We provide, in particular, an overview of the empirically...

We review the vast literature on social preferences by assessing what is known about their fundamental properties, their distribution in the broader population, and their consequences for important economic and political behaviors. We provide, in particular, an overview of the empirically...

We set up a model of costly information production between two lobbies, a firm and a consumer group, competing for influence over an imperfectly informed but benevolent government. The government is endowed with a parametric amount of information and chooses the best policy from a finite,...

Rational outcomes of a social system do not necessarily require its individual par-ticipants to be rational. In macro systems, aggregate properties distinct from the behavior of their micro level components can emerge through complex interactions. Caution in building social sciences on...

Since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the success of the former Soviet Bloc countries to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) has been mixed. The objective of this paper is to capture the strategic interdependence between investment decisions by foreign firms and reform decisions by host...

We examine the formation of networks among a set of players whose payoffs depend on the structure of the network. We focus on games where players may bargain by promising or demanding transfer payments when forming links. We examine several variations of the transfer/bargaining aspect of link...