Social interactions provide a set of incentives for regulating individual behavior. Chief among these is stigma, the status loss and discrimination that results from the display of stigmatized attributes or behaviors. The stigmatization of behavior is the enforcement mechanism behind social...

Evolutionary arguments are often used to justify the fundamental behavioral postulates of competive equilibrium. Economists such as Milton Friedman have argued that natural selection favors profit maximizing firms over firms engaging in other behaviors. Consequently, producer efficiency, and...

Recent advances in evolutionary game theory have employed stochastic processes of noise in decisionmaking to select in favor of certain equilibria in coordination games. Noisy decisionmaking is justified on bounded rationality grounds, and consequently the sources of noise are left unmodelled....

Two of the most important refinements of the Nash equilibrium concept for extensive form games with perfect recall are Selten's (1975) {\it perfect equilibrium\/} and Kreps and Wilson's (1982) more inclusive {\it sequential equilibrium\/}. These two equilibrium refinements are motivated in very...

The stochastic evolutionary game literature is built on three behavioral postulates: ``noisy'' decisionmaking, myopic decisionmaking and random opportunities for choice (inertia). The role of noise is by now well- understood. This paper investigates the significance of the other two postulates....

This paper adopts a different approach to the study of the persistence of U.S. GNP. First, this paper uses a more powerful version of the ADF test developed by Elliot, Rothenberg and Stock (1992). Second, we also examine the results from a unit root test that has trend stationarity as the null...

We apply a comprehensive set of survey data, on forecasts for 24 currencies against the dollar, to four topics. (1) We find some predictive power in the survey data (and in the right direction!). As in past tests, the forecasts are nevertheless biased: variability of expected depreciation is...

Exchange rate forecasts are generated using some popular monetary models of exchange rates, in conjunction with several estimation techniques. We propose an alternative set of criteria for evaluating forecast rationality, which entails the following requirements: the forecast and the actual...

This paper examines whether output per capita in 126 countries is better described as trend or difference stationary using formal statistical tests. Appropriate finite-sample critical values are constructed to evaluate the test results. Depending upon whether one uses solely a test with a trend...

Interest rate based tests and savings-investment correlations disagree on the extent of capital mobility in Pacific Rim economies. The apparent success of several East Asian countries in sterilizing capital inflows has also fueled the controversy. This paper argues that previous studies...