It stands to reason that social unrest does not erupt out of the blue. Although there are a great many reasons why social dismay might descend into social disorder, only few yardsticks or indices can plausibly be used to gauge the potential for social unrest (PSU). If policy makers want to...

Consider a population of farmers who live around a lake. Each farmer engages in trade with his two adjacent neighbors. The trade is governed by a prisoner's dilemma 'rule of engagement'. A farmer's payoff is the sum of the payoffs from the two prisoner's dilemma games played with his two...

In a haystack-type representation of a heterogeneous population that is evolving according to a payoff structure of a prisoner's dilemma game, migration is modeled as a process of swapping" individuals between heterogeneous groups of constant size after a random allocation fills the haystacks,...

We develop a formula for the optimal size of a joint savings association between individuals who share the same financial goal and who can save towards that goal at the same rate. Our motivating example and the core of our analysis is a Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA). We measure...

In this paper we consider a population of would-be migrants in a developing country. To begin with, this population is divided into two sets: those who save by themselves to pay for the cost of their migration, and those who pool their savings with the savings of another would-be migrant to pay...

We study a developing countries setting in which agglomeration efficiency of urban production attracts rural-to-urban migration, whereas urban pollution deters rural-to-urban migration. By means of a general equilibrium model we study the formation of policies aimed at striking a socially...

Received migration research has it that higher relative deprivation strengthens the incentive for people to migrate, and that migration is often a risky enterprise. Relative deprivation has been seen as a push factor in migration, and the level of risk involved in migration has been understood...

We model an environment in which individuals prefer to be in a space in which their rank is higher, be it a social space, a geographical space, a work environment, or any other comparison sphere which we refer to in this paper, and without loss of generality, as a region. When the individuals...

I study attitudes towards risk taking in cases where a person relates to others positively, namely altruistically. This study is needed because it is unclear how altruism influences the inclination of an altruistic person to take risks. Will this person's risk-taking behavior differ if the...

We present a new index for measuring income inequality in networks. The index is based on income comparisons made by the members of a network who are linked with each other by direct social connections. To model the comparisons, we compose a measure of relative deprivation for networks. We base...