Only 5.5 percent of black males married white females in 1990, and the family-income premium for intermarried black males was 7 percent. This paper estimates the impact of the mating taboo, courting opportunities, and individual endowments on the black male marriage market. Results indicate that eliminating the mating taboo would raise the intermarriage rate from 5.5 to 64 percent, and do away ...

This survey discusses behavioral and experimental macroeconomics, emphasizing a complex systems perspective. The economy consists of boundedly rational heterogeneous agents who do not fully understand their environment use simple decision heuristics. Central to our is the question under which conditions macro-system interacting may or coordinate on equilibrium outcome. A general finding that po...

This paper proposes axiomatic foundations of expectation formation rules, by which deviating players anticipate the reaction of external players in a partition function game. The axioms single out the projection rule among the rules that depend on the current partition and the pessimistic rule among the ones that are independent of the current partition. This analysis suggests that the projecti...

Empirical research suggests that rather than improving incentives exerting control can reduce workers’ performance by eroding motivation. The present paper shows that intention-based reciprocity can cause such motivational crowding-out if individuals differ in their propensity for reciprocity and preferences are private information. Not being controlled might then be considered to be kind, beca...

Watson (2002) proposes non-forcing contracts as a way to show the limitations of the mechanism design program with ex-post renegotiation (Maskin and Moore (1999)). If one takes a partial implementation approach, as Watson does, we show that non-forcing contracts do not constitute an intermediate paradigm between implementation with no renegotiation and with ex-post renegotiation. Moreover, taki...

We explore the interaction between evolutionary stability and lexicographic preferences. To do so, we define a limit Nash equilibrium for a lexicographic game as the limit of Nash equilibria of nearby games with continuous preferences. Nash equilibria of lexicographic games are limit Nash equilibria, but not conversely. Modified evolutionarily stable strategies (Binmore and Samuelson, 1992. J. ...

Actual behaviour is influenced in important ways by moral emotions, for instance guilt or shame (see among others Tangney et al., 2007). Beliefdependant models of social preferences using the framework of psychological games aim to consider such emotions to explain other-regarding behaviour. Our study links recent advances in psychological theory on moral emotions to belief-dependant models in ...

Experiments have shown that people have a natural taste for cooperation. This paper takes a first step in understanding how formal and informal institutions might be designed to utilize these private tastes to facilitate more efficient economic interactions. We examine a twice-played prisoner’ dilemma in which the total of the stakes in the two periods is fixed, but the distribution of these st...