This paper provides an argument for the advantage of a preference for identity-consistent behaviour from an evolutionary point of view. Within a stylised model of social interaction, we show that the development of cooperative social norms is greatly facilitated if the agents of the society...

The standard state-spaces of asymmetric information preclude non-trivial forms of unawareness (Modica and Rustichini, 1994, Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini, 1998). We introduce a generalized state-space model that allows for non-trivial unawareness among several individuals, and which satisfies...

When investments are non-verifiable, inducing cooperative investments with simple contracts may not be as difficult as previously thought. Indeed, modeling 'expectation damages' close to legal practice, we show that the default remedy of contract law induces the first best. Yet, in order to...

In the hold-up problem incomplete contracts cause the proceeds of relation-specific investments to be allocated by ex-post bargaining. The present paper investigates the efficiency of incomplete contracts if individuals have heterogeneous preferences implying heterogeneous bargaining behavior...

We propose a positive formal framework for analyzing sovereign bail-outs in the context of the European Monetary Union (EMU) with a view to making policy recommendations regarding improvements to the EMU institutional architecture. We build our analysis on a political economic game-theoretic...

Bergin and Lipman (1996) show that the refinement effect from the random mutations in the adaptive population dynamics in Kandori, Mailath and rob (1993) and Young (1993) is due to restrictions on how these mutation rates vary across population states. We here model mutation rates as...

Bergin and Lipman (1996) show that the refinement effect from the random mutations in the adaptive dynamics in Kandori, Mailath and Rob (1993) and Young (1993) is due to restrictions on how these mutation rates vary across population states. We here model these mutation rates as endogenously...