Spatial evolutionary games model individuals who are distributed in a spatial domain and update their strategies upon playing a normal form game with their neighbors. We derive integro-differential equations as deterministic approximations of the microscopic updating stochastic processes. This...

Social preferences such as altruism, reciprocity, intrinsic motivation and a desire to uphold ethical norms are essential to good government, often facilitating socially desirable allocations that would be unattainable by incentives that appeal solely to self-interest. But experimental and other...

Punishment of shirkers is often an effective means of attenuating incentive problems and sustaining coordination in work teams. Explanations of the motivation to punish generally rely either on small group size or on a Folk theorem that requires coordinated punishment and, hence, highly accurate...

Social preferences such as altruism, reciprocity, intrinsic motivation and a desire to uphold ethical norms are essential to good government, often facilitating socially desirable allocations that would be unattainable by incentives that appeal solely to self-interest. But experimental and other...

Some philosophers and social scientists have stressed the importance for good government of an altruistic citizenry that values the well being of fellow citizens. Economists, however, have emphasized the need for incentives that induce even the self-interested to contribute to the public good....

Some philosophers and social scientists have stressed the importance for good government of an altruistic citizenry that values the well being of fellow citizens. Economists, however, have emphasized the need for incentives that induce even the self-interested to contribute to the public good....

We study equilibrium selection in stochastic evolutionary bargaining games in which idiosyncratic play is intentional instead of random. In contract games, the stochastically stable state selected by intentional idiosyncratic play is the Nash bargain, rather than the usual Kalai-Smorodinsky...

This paper studies how the technology of military conflict affects the allocation of resources in military spending (“guns”) and productive investment (“butter”). We first identify the fundamental property of conflict technology which the two commonly used contest success functions, the...

In both experimental and natural settings, incentives sometimes underperform, generating smaller effects on the targeted behaviors than would be predicted for entirely self-regarding agents. A parsimonious explanation is that incentives that appeal to self-regarding economic motives may crowd...