This paper looks at the incentives to free-ride on the information signaling of others and shows how this can lead to delay in productive activity and to a cascade of activity once information is signaled. In the presence of increasing returns to scale to a profitable project, an initial pioneer...

This paper explores strategic trade in short-lived derivative securities by agents that possess long-term information about an underlying asset. In contrast to trading equity, where an informed agent will ultimately benefit from his trades, trading short-lived securities is profitable only if...

We study economic environments in which agents make choices on the basis of relative performance criteria and call the associated class of dynamic adjustment rules "comparative dynamics". We distinguish two classes of learning behavior: learning from the population experience (imitative...

Many political commentators diagnose an increasing polarization of the U.S. electorate into two opposing camps. However, in standard spatial voting models, changes in the political preference distribution are irrelevant as long as the position of the median voter does not change. We show that...