Synopsis: According to skew selection, ant queens are neither ruthlessly selfish nor blindly altruistic; they are shrewd investors. The goal of shrewd investors is not to win the game, but to continue play over evolutionary time. Skew selection describes a set of investment strategies employed by...

Traditionally, economics has regarded institutions, notably norms and regulations, as fixed or exogenous. Surprisingly few insights on institutional evolution from natural and social sciences have made their way into economics. This article gives an overview of evolutionary theories of...

The paper introduces the assumption of costly information acquisition to the theory of mechanism design for matching allocation problems. It is shown that the assumption of endogenous information acquisition greatly changes some of the cherished results in that theory: in particular, the...

We adopt the largest consistent set defined by Chwe [J. of Econ. Theory 63 (1994), 299-235] to predict which coalition structures are possibly stable when players are farsighted. We also introduce a refinement, the largest cautious consistent set, based on the assumption that players are...

In the models of Young (1993a,b), boundedly rational individuals are recurrently matched to play a game, and they play myopic best replies to the recent history of play. It could therefore be an advantage to instead play a myopic best reply to the myopic best reply, something boundedly rational...

Axiomatic bargaining theory (e.g., Nash's theorem) is static. We attempt to provide a dynamic justification for the theory. Suppose a Judge or Arbitrator must allocate utility in an (infinite) sequence of two-person problems; at each date, the Judge is presented with a utility possibility set in...