This paper considers learning rules for environments in which little prior and feedback information is available to the decision-maker. Two properties of such learning rules, absolute expediency and monotonicity, are studied. The paper provides some necessary and some sufficient conditions for...

This paper considers a version of Bush and Mosteller's stochastic learning theory in the context of games. We compare this model of learning to a model of biological evolution. The purpose is to investigate analogies between learning and evolution. We and that in the continuous time limit the...

This risk.paper considers a simple learning process for decision problems under All behaviour change derives from the reinforcing or deterring effect of instantaneous payoff experiences. Payoff experiences are reinforcing or deterring depending on whether the payoff exceeds an aspiration level...

This paper shows that public provision of private goods may be justified on pure efficiency grounds in an environment where individuals consume both public and private goods. The government's involvement in the provision of private goods provides it with information about individuals' private...

the private good improves economic efficiency under a condition that is always fulfilled under stochastic independence and satisfied for an open set of joint distributions. Our model is an example where there is an efficiency loss from separating revenue and expenditure problems, and is...

We use a simple model of statistical discrimination to empirically disentangle two different sources of racial wage inequality: differences in the distribution of pre-market factors that affect human capital, and differences in incentives to acquire human capital when young. We show how the...

We consider an environment with asymmetric information about preferences for a public good and a private good. If the public good must be financed from contributions made by participants and if participants must be given incentives to participate in the mechanism, we show that there are...