In London, at the Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines (LSE), a symposium was held on 6 December 1997 - the anniversary of the day when the members of Iwakura's delegation were received by Queen Victoria. Comprising four lectures the symposium was...

This paper extends the classic two-armed bandit problem to a many-agent setting in which N players each face the same experimentation problem. The difference with the single-agent problem is that agents can now learn from the experiments of others. Thus, experiementation produces a public good...

Many recent stochastic dynamic models in economics and finance are based on the theory of Brownian motion and its control or regulation. A heuristic exposition of this theory is presented with emphasis given to Itô's Lemma, the calculation of expected values and the derivation of Smooth Pasting...

Savage motivated his Sure-Thing Principle b y arguing that, whenever an act would be preferred if an event obtains and preferred if an event did not obtain, then it should be preferred overall. The idea that it should be possible to decompose and recompose decision problems in this way has...

We examine a recursive algorithm for learning steady states and cycles in stochastic nonlinear models. Necessary and sufficient conditions for local convergence are shown to be equivalent to easily computable expectational-stability conditions. These conditions are affected by the distribution...

Bewley's programme of excluding price singularities in equilibrium solutions for commodity spaces of bounded functions is reconsidered. From two recent examples in which singularities are indispensable, viz., marginal cost pricing in continuous time and an overlapping generations model, it is...

This paper suggests a reason, other than asymmetric formation, why agency contracts are not explicitly contingent on the contracting parties' performances or actions. This reason is the formal nature of contracts: the form, usually written, that contracts are required to take to be enforceable...

In this paper the internal organisation of firms is reduced to the organisation of a communication network. In the presence of information communication and processing costs it is important to design rules guiding which members of the firm ought to communicate with one another on a regular...