Psychologists report that people make choices on the basis of "decision utilities" that routinely overestimate the "experienced utility" consequences of these choices. This paper argues that this dichotomy between decision and experienced utilities may be the solution to an evolutionary design...

This paper investigates the evolutionary foundation for our capacity to attribute preferences to others. This ability is intrinsic to game theory, and is a key component of "Theory of Mind'' (ToM), perhaps the capstone of social cognition. We argue here that this component of theory of mind...

We examine a repeated interaction between an agent, who undertakes experiments, and a principal who provides the requisite funding for these experiments. The agent's actions are hidden, and the principal, who makes the offers, cannot commit to future actions. We identify the unique Markovian...

This paper examines circumstances under which subjectivity enhances the effectiveness of inductive reasoning. We consider a game in which Fate chooses a data generating process and agents are characterized by inference rules that may be purely objective (or data-based) or may incorporate...

A large literature uses matching models to analyze markets with two-sided heterogeneity, studying problems such as the matching of students to schools, residents to hospitals, husbands to wives, and workers to firms. The analysis typically assumes that the agents have complete information, and...

We study a discrete-time model of repeated moral hazard without commitment. In every period, a principal finances a project, choosing the scale of the project and a contingent payment plan for an agent, who has the opportunity to appropriate the returns of a successful project unbeknownst the...

Different markets are cleared by different types of prices -- seller-specific prices that are uniform across buyers in some markets, and personalized prices tailored to the buyer in others. We examine a setting in which buyers and sellers make investments before matching in a competitive market....

Different markets are cleared by different types of prices - a universal price for all buyers and sellers in some markets, seller-specific prices that are uniform across buyers in others, and personalized prices tailored to both the buyer and the seller in yet others. We introduce the notion of...

We examine a repeated interaction between an agent, who undertakes experiments, and a principal who provides the requisite funding for these experiments. The repeated interaction gives rise to a dynamic agency cost — the more lucrative is the agent's stream of future rents following a failure,...

We study markets in which agents first make investments and are then matched into potentially productive partnerships. Equilibrium investments and the equilibrium matching will be efficient if agents can simultaneously negotiate investments and matches, but we focus on markets in which agents...