This is a paper in the ``economists ruin everything'' field. It considers whether Catch-22 situations can persist as an equilibrium phenomenon. Rather than being an arbitrary rule or a set of self-serving beliefs, the focus is on the preferences of Gatekeepers who choose to create such...

The canonical example of unprotected speech--falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre--presumes such an act inevitably causes harmful panic. This paper challenges that presumption through a game-theoretic analysis of evacuation dynamics. I model a theatre as an N * M grid where rational...