Related papers: Wariness and Poverty Traps
This paper seeks to explore the potential trade-off arising between the theories of $\textit{Equality of Opportunity}$ and $\textit{Opportunity Pluralism}$. Whereas the first theory has received much attention in the literature on Welfare…
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century puts forth a logically consistent explanation for changes in income and wealth inequality patterns. However, while rich in data, the book provides no formal empirical testing for its…
The exploration-exploitation dilemma has been an intriguing and unsolved problem within the framework of reinforcement learning. "Optimism in the face of uncertainty" and model building play central roles in advanced exploration methods.…
The effects of saving and spending patterns on holding time distribution of money are investigated based on the ideal gas-like models. We show the steady-state distribution obeys an exponential law when the saving factor is set uniformly,…
This paper characterizes equilibrium properties of a broad class of economic models that allow multiple heterogeneous agents to interact in heterogeneous manners across several markets. Our key contribution is a new theorem providing…
We present a formal model for studying fashion trends, in terms of three parameters of fashionable items: (1) their innate utility; (2) individual boredom associated with repeated usage of an item; and (3) social influences associated with…
The view that altruistic punishment plays an important role in supporting public cooperation among human beings and other species has been widely accepted by the public. However, the positive role of altruistic punishment in enhancing…
We study an agent-based model of evolution of wealth distribution in a macro-economic system. The evolution is driven by multiplicative stochastic fluctuations governed by the law of proportionate growth and interactions between agents. We…
This paper contributes to the treatment of extensive constraints in evolutionary many-constraint optimization through consideration of the relationships between pair-wise constraints. In a conflicting relationship, the functional value of…
We study the lock-in effect in a network of task assignments. Agents have a heterogeneous fitness for solving tasks and can redistribute unfinished tasks to other agents. They learn over time to whom to reassign tasks and preferably choose…
We develop an axiomatic framework to evaluate income distributions from the perspective of an opportunity-egalitarian social planner. Building on a formal link with the literature on decision theory under ambiguity, we characterize a class…
People often deviate from expected utility theory when making risky and intertemporal choices. While the effects of probabilistic risk and time delay have been extensively studied in isolation, their interplay and underlying theoretical…
We investigate a model of transportation networks with nonlinear elements which may represent local shortage of resources. Frustrations arise from competition for resources. When the initial resources are uniform, different regimes with…
We investigate a multi-household DSGE model in which past aggregate consumption impacts the confidence, and therefore consumption propensity, of individual households. We find that such a minimal setup is extremely rich, and leads to a…
This paper studies lying in a novel context. Previous work has focused on situations in which people are either fully aware of the economic consequences of all available actions (e.g., die-under-cup paradigm), or they are uncertain, but…
We study the role of imitation within the Minority Game model of market. The players can exchange information locally, which leads to formation of groups which act as if they were single players. Coherent spatial areas of rich and poor…
Recently, we introduced in arXiv:1105.2434 a model for product adoption in social networks with multiple products, where the agents, influenced by their neighbours, can adopt one out of several alternatives. We identify and analyze here…
I analyze factory worker households in the early 1920s in Osaka to examine idiosyncratic income shocks and consumption. Using the household-level monthly panel dataset, I find that while households could not fully cope with idiosyncratic…
Common asset holdings are widely believed to have been the primary vector of contagion in the recent financial crisis. We develop a network approach to the amplification of financial contagion due to the combination of overlapping…
Social and economic inequality is a plague of the XXI Century. It is continuously widening, as the wealth of a relatively small group increases and, therefore, the rest of the world shares a shrinking fraction of resources. This situation…