We examine the evolutionary foundations of intertemporal preferences. When all the risk affecting survival and reproduction is idiosyncratic, evolution selects for agents who maximize the discounted sum of expected utility, discounting at the sum of the population growth rate and the mortality...

We consider a growth model in which intergenerational transfers are made via stocks of private and public capital. Private capital is the outcome of individuals' private savings while decisions regarding public capital are made collectively. We hypothesize that private saving choices evolve...

The economics of hunting and gathering must have driven the biological evolution of human characteristics, since hunter-gatherer societies prevailed for the two million years of human history. These societies feature huge intergenerational resource flows, suggesting that these resource flows...

We reexamine Alan R. Rogers' (1994) analysis of the biological basis of the rate of time preference. Although his basic insight concerning the derivation of the utility function holds up, the functional form he uses does not generate equilibrium evolutionary behavior. Moreover, Rogers relies...

We consider a market with "red" and "green" workers, where labels are payoff irrelevant. Workers may acquire skills. Skilled workers search for vacancies, while firms search for workers. A unique symmetric equilibrium exists in which color is irrelevant. There are also asymmetric equilibria in...

The authors study a population of agents, each of whom can be an altruist or an egoist. Altruism is a strictly dominated strategy. Agents choose their actions by imitating others who earn high payoffs. Interactions between agents are local, so that each agent affects, and is affected by, only...

Hierarchical organizations often perform poorly in inducing the adoption of innovations. The authors examine a principal offering contracts to agents who make unobservable effort and adoption-of-innovation choices (yielding moral hazard); who occupy jobs of differing, unobserved productivities...