This paper studies whether civic capital acts an effective restraint against opportunistic behavior in transactions, looking at the degree of outsourcing to external suppliers of service provision in Italian firms. Our results show that, on average, firms tend to outsource more services where...

It is known that there are uncoupled learning heuristics leading to Nash equilibrium in all finite games. Why should players use such learning heuristics and where could they come from? We show that there is no uncoupled learning heuristic leading to Nash equilibrium in all finite games that a...

D. N. McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak have criticized economists and others for confounding statistical and substantive significance, and for committing the logical error of the transposed conditional. In doing so they sometimes misinterpret the function of significance tests. Nonetheless,...

The analysis of rational play in dynamic games is usually done within a static framework that specifies a player's initial beliefs as well as his disposition to revise those beliefs conditional on hypothetical states of information. We suggest a simpler approach, where the rationality of a...

In modern elections, ideologically motivated candidates with a wealth of information about individual voters and sophisticated campaign strategies are faced by voters who lack awareness of some political issues and are uncertain about the exact political positions of candidates. This is the...

Does leaving a currency union reduce international trade? This paper reexamines time series estimates of currency unions on trade from a historical perspective using a dynamic gravity equation and by conducting in-depth case studies of currency union breakups. The early large estimates are...

We correlate competitive bidding and profits in symmetric independent private value first-price auctions with salivary testosterone, estradiol, progesterone, and cortisol in more than 200 subjects. Females bid significantly higher and earn significantly lower profits than males. Moreover,...

We investigate the effect of trade integration on interstate military conflict. Our empirical analysis, based on a large panel data set of 243,225 country-pair observations from 1950 to 2000, confirms that an increase in bilateral trade interdependence significantly promotes peace. It also...

In an experiment using two-bidder first-price sealed bid auctions with symmetric independent private values and 400 subjects, we scan also the right hand of each subject. We study how the ratio of the length of the index and ring fingers (2D:4D) of the right hand, a measure of prenatal hormone...

We define a generalized state-space model with interactive unawareness and probabilistic beliefs. Such models are desirable for potential applications of asymmetric unawareness. Applying our unawareness belief structures, we show that the common prior assumption is too weak to rule out...