Until recently, theorists considering the evolution of human cooperation have paid little attention to institutional punishment, a defining feature of large-scale human societies. Compared to individually-administered punishment, institutional punishment offers a unique potential advantage: the...

We study how cooperation-enforcing institutions dynamically affect values and behavior using a lab experiment designed to create individual specific histories of past institutional exposure. We show that the effect of past institutions is mostly due to “indirect” behavioral spillovers:...

This paper considers the endogenous formation of an institution to provide a public good. If the institution governs only its members, players have an incentive to free ride on the institution formation of others and the social dilemma is simply shifted to a higher level. Addressing this...

The aim of this article is to link Veblen's work on evolutionary economics to recently developed evolutionary game theory (EGT). This represents the first step towards incorporating Veblen's socio-economic evolution theory into discussion concerning applying EGT to social environments. An...

Broadly speaking, institutional reformers decide about the sequencing of types of reforms, either addressing institutional quality or macroeconomic stability. This paper develops a dynamic population game, in which agents play a simple anonymous-exchange game of cooperating or defecting. Agents...

This paper studies the role of institution in a Darwinian evolutionary process of cultural selection. The primary function of an institution is to determine how citizens in a society are matched pairwisely to interact. We examine three different types of institutions: utilitarian, egalitarian,...

This article develops a theory of standard-setting in which accounting standards emerge endogenously from an institutional bargaining process. It provides a unified framework with investment and voluntary disclosure to examine the links between regulatory institutions and accounting choice....

Cultural and institutional differences among nations may result in differences in the ratios of marginal costs of goods in autarchy and thus be the basis of specialization and comparative advantage, as long as these differences are not eliminated by trade. We provide an evolutionary model of...

Cultural and institutional differences among nations may result in differences in the ratios of marginal costs of goods in autarchy and thus be the basis of specialization and comparative advantage, as long as these differences are not eliminated by trade. We provide an evolutionary model of...