Using a natural voting experiment in Switzerland that encompasses a 160-year period (1848–2009), we investigate whether a higher level of complexity leads to increased reliance on expert knowledge. We find that when more referenda are held on the same day, constituents are more likely to refer...

We consider a simple dynamic model of environmental taxation that exhibits time inconsistency. There are two categories of firms, Believers, who take the tax announcements made by the Regulator to face value, and Non-Believers, who perfectly anticipate the Regulator's decisions, albeit at a...

Interpret a set of players all playing the same pure strategy and all with similar attributes as a society. Is it consistent with self interested behaviour for a population to organise itself into a relatively small number of societies? In a companion paper we characterised how large e must be,...

We study learning and influence in a setting where agents communicate according to an arbitrary social network and naïvely update their beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of their neighbors’ opinions. A focus is on conditions under which beliefs of all agents in large societies...

We define a finite-horizon repeated network formation game with consent, and study the differences induced by different levels of individual rationality. We prove that perfectly rational players will remain unconnected at the equilibrium, while nonempty equilibrium networks may form when,...

In has been frequently observed, in both economics and psychology, that individuals tend to conform to the choices of other individuals with whom thy identify. Can such conformity be consistent with self-interested behaviour? To address this question we use the framework of games with incomplete...