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...

Do agents believe to be agreeing more with others in the long-run? This paper designs an experiment to study how cognitive abilities affect actual and perceived disagreement in a standard sequential belief updating task with public signals. We document a persistent gap in the perception of...

This paper argues that, to be forward-looking in a logically consistent sense, a decision maker must take account of his overall well-being, not just his instantaneous utility, in all future periods. However, such a decision-maker is necessarily time inconsistent. The paper explores the...

In many economic applications involving comparisons of multivariate distributions, supermodularity of an objective function is a natural property for capturing a preference for greater interdependence. One multivariate distribution dominates another according to the supermodular stochastic...

A frequently heard explanation for the underdeveloped metro system in Rome is the following one: If we tried to build a new metro line, it would probably be stopped by archeological finds that are too valuable to destroy, so the investment would be wasted. This statement, which seems...

Cooperative concepts of renegotiation in repeated games have typically assumed that Paretoranked equilibria could not coexist within the same renegotiation-proof set. With explicit renegotiation, however, a proposal to move to a Pareto-superior equilibrium can be deterred by a different...

Many facts are learned through the intermediation of individuals with special access to information, such as law enforcement officers, employees with a security clearance, or experts with specific knowledge. This paper considers whether societies can learn about such facts when information is...