The importance of categorical reasoning in human cognition is well-established in psychology and cognitive science, and it is generally acknowledged that one of the most important functions of categorization is to facilitate prediction. This paper provides a model of optimal categorization. In...

The importance of categorical reasoning in human cognition is well-established in psychology and cognitive science, and it is generally acknowledged that one of the most important functions of categorization is to facilitate prediction. This paper provides a model of optimal categorization. In...

We experimentally explore the role of collective incentives in sustaining cooperation in finitely repeated public goods games with imperfect monitoring. In our experiment players only observe noisy signals about individual contributions, while total output is perfectly observed. We consider...

We study environments in which agents are randomly matched to play a Prisoner's Dilemma, and each player observes a few of the partner's past actions against previous opponents. We depart from the existing related literature by allowing a small fraction of the population to be commitment types....

In various environments new agents may base their decisions on observations of actions taken by a few other agents in the past. In this paper we analyze a broad class of such social learning processes, and study under what circumstances the initial behavior of the population has a lasting...

We develop a formal model of social duties. Duties to respect entitlements (duties of justice) differ from duties to promote well-being (duties of charity). A situationspecific version of our model takes entitlements as primitives. A fully portable version derives entitlements from situational...