We wish to study optimal dynamic nonlinear income taxes. Do real world taxes share some of their features? What policy prescriptions can be made? We study a two period model, where the consumers and government each have separate budget constraints in the two periods, so income cannot be...

The ability to adjust to changes in the environment (shifts in regime) has not been demonstrated in the models of individual behavior studied in the literature. This is an important issue that has not been given much attention in the learning literature. In this paper, we study the behavior of...

We study three learning rules (reinforcement learning (RL), experience weighted attraction learning (EWA), and individual evolutionary learning (IEL)) and how they perform in three different Groves-Ledyard mechanisms. We are interested in how well these learning rules duplicate human behavior in...

We analyze the role of political competition on the type of economic policies that are selected in a one sector model of economic growth. We identify conditions under which neoclassical optimal growth plans occur, and conditions in which political business cycles occur. We find that the ability...

The data from experiments with the Voluntary Contributions Mechanism suggest five stylized facts, including the restart effect. To date, no theory has explained all of these facts simultaneously. We merge our Individual Evolutionary Learning model with a variation of heterogeneous...