Related papers: Replacement and Reputation
We examine an economy in which interactions are more productive if agents can trust others to refrain from cheating. Some agents are scoundrels, who cheat at every opportunity, while others cheat only if the cost of cheating, a decreasing…
Societies experience politically stable and unstable phases along history, whereas political power is usually passed to new elite groups by these changes. Structural dynamics of the elites in a society have been proposed to be one of the…
I study reputation formation in repeated games where player actions endogenously determine the probability the game permanently ends. Permanent exit can render reputation useless even to a patient long-lived player whose actions are…
Opinion dynamics is nowadays a very common field of research. In this article we formulate and then study a novel, namely strategic perspective on such dynamics: There are the usual normal agents that update their opinions, for instance…
A representative researcher has repeated opportunities for empirical research. To process findings, she must impose an "identifying assumption." She conducts research when the assumption is sufficiently plausible (taking into account both…
The study of opinions, their formation and change, is one of the defining topics addressed by social psychology, but in recent years other disciplines, like computer science and complexity, have tried to deal with this issue. Despite the…
I revisit the canonical reputation framework in which a long-lived player interacts with a sequence of short-lived opponents and may be either strategic or a commitment type who always plays the same, possibly mixed, action. I depart by…
We formalize the argument that political disagreements can be traced to a "clash of narratives". Drawing on the "Bayesian Networks" literature, we model a narrative as a causal model that maps actions into consequences, weaving a selection…
This paper examines experimentally how reputational uncertainty and the rate of change of the social environment determine cooperation. Reputational uncertainty significantly decreases cooperation, while a fast-changing social environment…
This paper studies how the organization of production shapes democratic accountability. I propose a model in which learning economies make specialization productively efficient: most workers perform one-domain tasks, while a small set of…
We propose an exactly solvable model for the dynamics of voters in a two-party system. The opinion formation process is modeled on a random network of agents. The dynamical nature of interpersonal relations is also reflected in the model,…
In many prediction problems, the predictive model affects the distribution of the prediction target. This phenomenon is known as performativity and is often caused by the behavior of individuals with vested interests in the outcome of the…
We discuss voting scenarios in which the set of voters (agents) and the set of alternatives are the same; that is, voters select a single representative from among themselves. Such a scenario happens, for instance, when a committee selects…
The best empirical research in political science clearly defines substantive parameters of interest, presents a set of assumptions that guarantee its identification, and uses an appropriate estimator. We argue for the importance of…
Cooperation is a crucial aspect of social life, yet understanding the nature of cooperation and how it can be promoted is an ongoing challenge. One mechanism for cooperation is indirect reciprocity. According to this mechanism, individuals…
We study optimal taxation when citizens hold beliefs about an honest versus opportunistic government and update those beliefs from observed taxes and delivery. In a Ramsey economy with competitive firms, the government privately knows its…
Many online marketplaces enjoy great success. Buyers and sellers in successful markets carry out cooperative transactions even if they do not know each other in advance and a moral hazard exists. An indispensable component that enables…
Various formulations of counterfactual general equilibrium in economies -- systems of actors manipulating economic goods -- are logically and mathematically analyzed. Evenly-rotating economies are systems whose evolution is stable, steady,…
People often interact repeatedly: with relatives, through file sharing, in politics, etc. Many such interactions are reciprocal: reacting to the actions of the other. In order to facilitate decisions regarding reciprocal interactions, we…
Models that explain the economical and political realities of nowadays societies should help all the world's citizens. Yet, the last four years showed that the current models are missing. Here we develop a dynamical society-deciders model…