When far-sighted agents may adjust their behavior only gradually , the issue of equilibrium selection in games becomes one of tension between "history" and "expectations". This paper analyzes whether, in this context, a planner may intervene successfully through short-run policies which redirect...

This paper models the dynamic process through which a large society may succeed in building up its "social capital" by establishing a stable and dense pattern of interaction among its members. In the model, agents interact according to a collection of (idyosincratic) infinitely repeated...

Consider a large (continuum) population of finitely-lived agents organized in hierarchical levels.Every period, agents are matched to play a certain symmetric game. On the basis of the payoffsobtained, a certain p-fraction of those who performed best at each level are promoted upwords. Onthe...

This paper studies a stylized model of local interaction where agents choose from an ever increasing set of vertically ranked actions, e.g. technologies. The driving forces of the model are infrequent upward shifts ("updates"), followed by a rapid process of local imitation ("diffusion"). Our...

We study a setting in which individual players choose their partners as well as a mode of behavior in 2 x 2 anti-coordination games -- games where a player's best response is to behave differently than the opponent. We characterize the nature of equilibrium networks as well as study the effects...

In many economic and social contexts, individual players choose their partners and also decide on a mode of behavior in interactions with these partners. This paper develops a simple model to examine the interaction between partner choice and individual behavior in games of coordination. An...

A model of "satisficing" behavior in the repeated Prisoners Dilemma is studied. Each player has an aspiration at each date, and takes an action. [S]he switches from the action played in the previous period only if the achieved payoff fell below the aspiration level (with a probability that...

Competition tends to promote efficient (equilibrium) behavior through the higher survival of the organizations (say firms) that adopt it. On the other hand, culture (understood as the "inherited" social pattern of behavior) may induce certain short-run inertias. This paper analyzes a dynamic...

The paper reports an experimental study based on a variant of the popular Chinos game, which is used as a simple but paradigmatic instance of observational learning. There are three players, arranged in sequence, each of whom wins a fixed price if she manages to guess the total number of coins...

In our study we focus on the determinants of reputation and, in particular, on the relation between the quality of annual report disclosures of companies and their reputation. We try to bring together two strands of literature: the literature on corporate reputation and the literature on...