In club models of religion, sacrifices demanded by religious groups promote efficient production of club goods by screening out free riders. An alternative, complementary view is that religious clubs provide a means of sorting, matching individuals with similar characteristics. Sorting differs from screening in that it operates on traits that do not directly affect club goods production. This p...

The maximum Nash welfare (MNW) solution — which selects an allocation that maximizes the product of utilities — is known to provide outstanding fairness guarantees when allocating divisible goods. And while it seems to lose its luster when applied to indivisible goods, we show that, in fact, the MNW solution is strikingly fair even in that setting. In particular, we prove that it selects alloca...

Can the presence of nontraded consumption goods or nontraded factors of production explain the high degree of ‘‘home bias’’ displayed by investor portfolios? We find that the answer is no, so long as individuals have access to free international trade in financial assets. In particular, it is never optimal to exhibit home bias with respect to domestic traded-good equities. By contrast, holdings...

Free riding experiments have generated many anomalous results that cannot be explained with standard Nash equilibrium models of public goods. This paper examines the experiments within the context of evolutionary game theory. This approach models the decision process of agents by an adaptive learning algorithm. The algorithm ‘strengthens’ strategies that do relatively well and ‘weakens’ strateg...

This paper considers incentives to provide goods that are non-excludable along social or geographic links. We find, first, that networks can lead to specialization in public good provision. In every social network there is an equilibrium where some individuals contribute and others free-ride. In many networks, this extreme is the only outcome. Second, specialization can benefit society as a who...

We create an agent-based simulation to explore consumer lock-in in a duopoly of experience goods (goods with characteristics that are difficult to determine in advance, but ascertained upon consumption). We model heterogeneous agents using simple assumptions, where agents choose between products based upon personal experience and neighbours’ decisions. We test strategies to break a lock-in thro...

Let % be a preference relation on a convex set F . Necessary and sufficient conditions are given that guarantee the existence of a set {ul} of affine utility functions on F such that % is represented by U ( f ) = ul ( f ) if f ∈ Fl; where each Fl is a convex subset of F . The interpretation is simple: facing a “non-homogeneous” set F of alternatives, a decision maker splits it into “homogeneous...

This paper describes the findings of a textual and structural analysis of the free-to-play social networking game FarmVille 2 (FV2) with a focus on the values (social, economic, etc.) available to players for digital objects within the game. FV2 is purportedly a social game, which might suggest that findings regarding the social values of objects from the study of material culture could play ou...

A multiattribute utility function can be represented by a function of single-attribute utility functions if the decision maker’s preference satisfies additive independence or mutually utility independence. Additive independence is a preference condition stronger than mutually utility independence, and the multiattribute utility function is in the additive form if the former condition is satisfi...

The effect of brand on consumer attitudes towards real and virtual goods is largely documented in consumer psychology and marketing. There is an obvious link between the design of a website and its brand. Yet, this effect has attracted little attention from the HCI community. This paper presents empirical evidence showing that brand attitude influences the evaluation of websites. The effect was...