This paper shows how competition generates reputation-building behavior in repeated interactions when the product quality observed by consumers is a noisy signal of firms' effort level. There are two types of firms and "good" firms try to distinguish themselves from "bad" firms. Although...

This paper examines moral hazard in teams over time. Agents are collectively engaged in a project whose duration and outcome are uncertain, and their individual efforts are unobserved. Free-riding leads not only to a reduction in effort, but also to procrastination. Collaboration among agents...

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...

We study transactions that require investments before trading in a competitive market, when forward contracts fixing the transaction price are absent. We show that, despite the market being perfectly competitive and subject to arbitrarily little uncertainty, the inability to jointly determine...

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...