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A social dilemma is, in essence, a prisoners' dilemma in a continuous strategy space. I discuss a number of social dilemmas that have caught my attention, offer an elementary, diagrammatic synthesis of them, and discuss some of the economic insights that the diagrams capture, including incentives for pre-commitment. Finally, I model pre-commitment via delegation and link results to the literature on the evolution of preferences.

A simulation of a sender/receiver game with common interest where players engage in anonymous, pairwise interactions reveals that there is a dynamic process where players climb an equilibrium payoff ladder. Moreover, the study finds that the players move successively from an equilibrium of one order to the next and eventually converging to an equilibrium on the highest possible order.

The geometry of a two-good partial-equilibrium model with economies of scope is presentede. There are three types of firms: diversified firms that produce both goods and two types of specialized firms. Thus, there are five possible industry market structures: one involving all three types of firms, three involving two types of firms, and one involving only diversified firms. We show that the equilibrium market structure is jointly determined by supply (cost) and demand conditions and that any market structure involving more types of firms than goods is an unlikely occurrence.

THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH AND THE EFFICIENCY OF INSTITUTIONS This paper explores the effect on economic efficiency of the distribution of wealth and systems for enforcing property rights. We construct [...]

Less information about a location has long been believed to be a barrier to new migration to that location. Diverse empirical results support this belief. Here we show that if agents are risk-neutral, less information about a location not only is not a barrier to migration to that location, it is actually an attractor. Only if agents are Bayesian and risk-averse is less information a barrier.