While people on all sides of the political spectrum were amazed that Donald Trump won the Republican nomination this paper demonstrates that Trump's victory was not a crazy event but rather the equilibrium outcome of a multi-candidate race where one candidate, the buffoon, is viewed as likely to...

The theory of reciprocity is predicated on the assumption that people are willing to reward nice or kind acts and to punish unkind ones. This assumption raises the question as to how to define kindness. In this paper we offer a new definition of kindness that we call “blame-freeness.” Put...

Recent experiments show that public goods can be provided at high levels when mutual monitoring and costly punishment are allowed. All these experiments, however, study monitoring and punishment in a setting where all agents can monitor and punish each other (i.e., in a complete network). The...

This paper considers the problem of why societies develop differently, a question most recently articulated by Acemoglu and Robinson (2012). We follow North (1990) in defining institutions as the "rules of the game in society." The question then becomes why do different societies develop...

We compare preferences for temporal resolution when uncertainty is resolved over a probability rather than a value. In various frameworks-e.g., Kreps and Porteus (1978)-, preferences over gradual versus one-shot resolution do not depend on whether values or probabilities define the main object...

We compare preferences for temporal resolution when uncertainty is resolved over a probability rather than a value. In various frameworks–e.g., Kreps and Porteus (1978)–, preferences over gradual versus one-shot resolution do not depend on whether values or probabilities define the main...