We study social learning and innovation in an overlapping generations model, emphasizing the trade-off between marginal innovation (combining existing technologies) and radical innovation (breaking new ground). We characterize both short-term and long-term dynamics of innovation, and the...

We study social learning and innovation in an overlapping generations model, emphasizing the trade-off between marginal innovation (combining existing technologies) and radical innovation (breaking new ground). We characterize both short-term and long-term dynamics of innovation, and the...

We consider collective decisions made by agents whose preferences and power depend on past events and decisions. Faced with an ineffcient equilibrium and an opportunity to commit to a policy, can the agents reach an agreement on such a policy? Under an intuitive condition linking power...

How do successive, forward-looking agents experiment with interdependent and endogenous technologies? In this paper, trying a radically new technology not only is informative of the value of similar technologies, but also reduces the cost of experimenting with them, in effect expanding the space...

Given two sets of random variables, how can one determine whether the former variables are more interdependent than the latter? This question is of major importance to economists, for example, in comparing how various policies affect systemic risk or income inequality. Moreover, correlation is...