This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural di¤usion have played a signi?cant role in giving rise to di¤erential patterns of economic devel- opment across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural di¤usion...

This is a brief survey describing some of the recent progress and open problems in the area of cooperative games with incomplete information. We discuss exchange economies, cooperative Bayesian games with orthogonal coalitions, and issues of cooperation in non-cooperative Bayesian games.

If women marry younger than men, increased population growth causes a sur- plus of women in the marriage market. This paper introduces search frictions into a matching model with transferable utility and age-dependent match payos to study if this so-called marriage squeeze has caused a dowry \in...

Consider a large market with asymmetric information, in which sellers choose whether to cooperate or deviate and ?cheat?their buyers, and buyers decide whether to re-purchase from di¤erent sellers. We model active trade relationships as links in a buyer-seller network and suggest a framework...

This paper studies the phenomenon of early hiring in entry-level labor markets (e.g. the market for gastroenterology fellowships and the market for judicial clerks) in the presence of social networks. We o¤er a two-stage model in which workers in training institutions reveal information on...

Consider the problem of information disclosure for a planner who faces two agents interacting in a state-dependent multi-action prisoners?dilemma. We ?nd conditions under which the planner can make use of his superior information by disclosing some of it to the agents, and conditions under which...

In this paper, we introduce a new measure of how close a set of choices are to satisfying the observable implications of rational choice, and apply it to a large balanced panel of household level consumption data. We use this method to answer three related questions: (i) "How close are...

This paper experimentally tests the predictions of a principal-agent model in which the agent has biased beliefs about his ability. Overcondent workers are found to earn lower wages than undercondent ones because they overestimate their expected payo, and principals adjust their oers...