We explain persistent differences in cultural traits of immigrant groups with the presence of community leaders. Leaders influence the cultural traits of their community, which have an impact on the group’s earnings. They determine whether a community will be more assimilated and...

We highlight that convergence in repeated averaging models commonly used to study cultural traits or opinion dynamics is not equivalent to convergence in Markov chain settings if transition matrices are time-varying. We then establish a new proof for the convergence of cultural traits in the...

A principal allocates a single good to one of several agents whose values are privately and independently distributed, employing an optimal mechanism. The principal shapes the distribution of the agents' values within general classes of constraints. Divisive product designs, which are either...