An analysis of the disease of formalism in modern economics. Its manifestation in general equilibrium theory, game theory, the new classical macroeconomics and real business cycle theory. Symptoms of the disease in the current vogue for postmodernism in methodololy. The possibilities for curing...

Cooperative business firms are prevalent in agribusiness, yet no concise generalized model exists to demonstrate how and why cooperative firms differ from, and may be selected over, the more common investor owned business firm. It is shown within a generic transaction game that cooperatives fill...

We describe non-cooperative game models and discuss game theoretic solution<br/>concepts. Some applications are also noted. Conventional theory focuses on the<br/>question ‘how will rational players play?’, and has the Nash equilibrium at its core.<br/>We discuss this concept and its interpretations, as...

We report the findings of an experiment designed to study how people learn and make decisions in network games. Network games offer new opportunities to identify learning rules, since on networks (compared to e.g. random matching) more rules differ in terms of their information requirements. Our...

Peoples' behavior in the aftermath of natural disasters may depend critically on various conditions. In this paper we postulate three conditions, likely to occur after massive natural disasters, that can adversely affect the trusting behavior of people within communities: rivalry for scarce...

A product set of strategies is a p-best response set if for each agent it contains all best responses to any distribution placing at least probability p on his opponents' profiles belonging to the product set. A p-best response set is minimal if it does not properly contain another p-best...

Non-marital cohabitation is a rapidly growing global phenomenon. Prior literature examines the puzzling empirical regularity that premarital cohabitation is associated with higher divorce rates. Since cohabitation should yield improved match-quality information, one might expect the opposite....

In this work, we use probabilistic cellular automata to model a population in which the cells represent individuals that interact with their neighbors playing a game. The games may have either the form of Prisoner’s Dilemma or Hawk-Dove (Snow-Drift, Chicken) games, and may be considered as a...

Why are salespeople in certain industries (such as cars and mattresses) aggressive, while their counterparts in other industries (such as luxury boutiques) relatively customer-oriented? Using a principal-agent-customer model, this paper demonstrates that the level of salesperson aggressiveness...