The effect that holding office has on the behavior of politicians is a crucial concern in the design of democratic institutions. Unfortunately, the treatment effects of holding elective office are difficult to estimate; they are likely confounded by selection bias arising from citizens...

Collective political action, such as protests, riots or social movements, requires the resolution of both cooperation and coordination problems. Solutions to these problems are widely seen to depend on the network that connects individuals to each other, because this network is a way for...

In this paper we focus on a neglected aspect of common pool resource problems – whether or not actors in a group can find a solution to the underlying coordination issue. Using a simple networked model of coordination we demonstrate that coordination problems are very difficult to solve when...

Game theory has been used to model large-scale social events — such as constitutional law, democratic stability, standard setting, gender roles, social movements, communication, markets, the selection of officials by means of elections, coalition formation, resource allocation, distribution of...

The way economists and other social scientists model how people make interdependent decisions is through the theory of games. Psychologists and behavioral economists, however, have established many deviations from the predictions of game theory. In response to these findings, a broad movement...

Quantal response equilibrium (QRE) has become a popular alternative to the standard Nash equilibrium concept in game theoretic applications. It is well known that human subjects do not regularly choose Nash equilibrium strategies. It has been hypothesized that subjects are limited by strategic...

Twentieth-century dispositions to model human cognition as logical systems have been undermined by evidence from the wild. Formal models of cognition as symbolic, algorithmic, internally consistent, disembodied, and sequentially marching through linear inference are not ecologically valid and...

People make choices. Often, the outcome depends on choices other people make. What mental steps do people go through when making such choices? Game theory, the most influential model of choice in economics and the social sciences, offers an answer, one based on games of strategy such as chess...

Game theoretic predictions about equilibrium behavior depend upon assumptions of inflexibility of belief, of accord between belief and choice, and of choice across situations that share a game-theoretic structure. However, researchers rarely possess any knowledge of the actual beliefs of...

Non-cooperative game theory is at its heart a theory of cognition, specifically a theory of how decisions are made. Game theory's leverage is that we can design different payoffs, settings, player arrays, action possibilities, and information structures, and that these differences lead to...