Prior research on "strategic voting" has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous, i.e.,...

In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic...

How do individuals shape societies? How do societies shape individuals? This paper develops a framework for studying the connections between micro and macro phenomena. The framework builds on two ingredients widely used in social science - population and variable. Starting with the simplest case...

Global games of regime change – coordination games of incomplete information in which a status quo is abandoned once a sufficiently large fraction of agents attacks it – have been used to study crises phenomena such as currency attacks, bank runs, debt crises, and political change. We extend...

This paper explores one option for the development of a theoretical approach to economic decision-making that goes beyond the mechanical-mathematical models based on the assumptions of rational self-interest and utility maximization. The proposed model incorporates facts, values, relationships,...

We study an opinion formation game between a Designer and an Adversary. While the Designer creates the network, both these players can influence network nodes (agents) initially, with ties being broken in favor of the Designer. Final opinions of agents are a convex combination of own opinions...

The literature on staggered privatization sales suggests that governments can effectively signal commitment to not expropriate the future rents of privatized firms. The privatization of telephone firms around the world provides an excellent opportunity to test this theory. Using a sample of...

This paper analyses the decision-making processes of heterogeneous agents, when both individual preferences and group actions are taken into account. Under the assumptions of certain topologies of interactions and assuming cognitive and informational restrictions, an agent-based model is...

We develop a theory of information flows and political regime change, when citizens use information and communication technologies (ICTs) for both information acquisition and protest coordination. Governments can respond by obfuscation of citizens' signal or by restricting access to ICTs used...

Behavioral economics characterizes decision-makers using psychologically-informed models. Cognitive science produces psychologically-informed models. Why don't these disciplines talk more? Here, I present several arguments for why cognitive science should inform behavioral economics — it...