Organizations such as the Food and Drug Agency can make both type I (approving bad drugs) and type II errors (rejecting good ones). Optimal reliability entails balancing these two kinds of mistakes just so. This paper addresses the question of whether and when an imperfectly rational agency - in...

In the last decade, there has been a resurgence of interest in problems of cooperation, stimulated largely by Axelrod's work. Using an innovative tournament approach, Axelrod found that a simple strategy, tit-for-tat (TFT), was most successful in playing the repeated prisoner's dilemma (PD) in a...

It is well known that inferential errors can induce nice but provocable strategies to engage in vendettas with each other. It is therefore generally believed that imperfect monitoring reduces the payoffs of such strategies and impairs the evolution of cooperation. The current literature,...

We model political parties as adaptive decision-makers who compete in a sequence of elections. The key assumptions are that <italic>winners satisfice</italic> (the winning party in period <italic>t</italic> keeps its platform in <italic>t</italic> + 1) while <italic>losers search</italic>. Under fairly mild assumptions about losers' search rules, we show that...

One of the best known ideas in the study of bounded rationality is Simon's satisficing; yet we still lack a standard formalization of the heuristic and its implications. We propose a mathematical model of satisficing which explicitly represents agents' aspirations and which explores both...

We study long run implications of reinforcement learning when two players repeatedly interact with one another over multiple rounds to play a finite action game. Within each round, the players play the game many successive times with a fixed set of aspirations used to evaluate payoff experiences...

The so-called "paradox of voting" is major anomaly for rational choice theories of elections. If voting is costly and citizens are rational then large electorates the expected turnout would be small, for if many people voted the chance of anyone being pivotal would be too small to make the act...

We survey modern models of delegation which assume that a boss and subordinate pursue their own goals. Among the major themes covered are the following: the conditions under which the boss will prefer to delegate versus those in which she will prefer to retain authority; the ways in which a boss...