The U.K.'s decision to leave the EU and the voting in of the protectionist Donald Trump to the US presidency has drawn both the UK and the USA into the Nash Trap.U.S. mathematician John Nash (the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind') postulated that Adam Smith's declaration that ‘In competition,...

Arms races – enduring rivalries between pairs of hostile powers, which prompt competitive acquisition of military capability – appear to be a pervasive phenomenon. From the past Cold War competition, between the US and the USSR, to present regional antagonisms, such as India and Pakistan,...

Why is inflation so much lower and at the same time more stable in developed economies in the 1990s, compared with the 1970s? This paper suggests that the United Kingdom, United States and other countries may have escaped from a volatile inflation equilibrium. Our argument builds on the story...

We study the propagation of monetary shocks in a sticky-price general-equilibrium economy where the firms’ pricing strategy feature a complementarity with the decisions of other firms. In a dynamic equilibrium the firm’s price-setting decisions depend on aggregates, which in turn depend on...

This paper derives the equilibrium Nash strategies of two central banks for economies related by trade. Both policy makers seek to stabilize inflation and output but are constrained by their economies' interactions. Into this mix is added the further assumption of Knightian uncertainty regarding...

We study the propagation of monetary shocks in a sticky-price general-equilibrium economy where the firms' pricing strategy feature a complementarity with the decisions of other firms. In a dynamic equilibrium the firm's price-setting decisions depend on aggregates, which in turn depend on...

In the light of the recent financial crisis, we investigate the effects generated by limited asset market participation on optimal monetary and fiscal policy, where monetary and fiscal authority are independent and play strategically. We find that limited asset market participation strongly...

The paper reports an experimental study based on a variant of the popular Chinos game, which is used as a simple but paradigmatic instance of observational learning. There are three players, arranged in sequence, each of whom wins a fixed price if she manages to guess the total number of coins...

We have experimentally tested a theory of bounded rational behavior in a "lemon market". It provides an explanation for the observation that real world players successfully conclude transactions when perfect rationality predicts a market collapse. We analyzed two different market designs :...

In this paper we experimentally test a theory of boundedly rational behavior in a "lemons market." We analyzed two different market designs, for which perfect rationality implies complete and partial market collapse, respectively. Our empirical observations deviate substantially from these...