Many cultural products have the same non-rival nature as scientific knowledge. They therefore face identical difficulties in creation and dissemination. One traditional view says market failure is endemic – societies tolerate monopolistic inefficiency in intellectual property (IP) protection...

This paper reviews a number of recent contributions that demonstrate that a blend of welfare economics and statistical analysis is useful in the evaluation of the citations received by scientific papers in the periodical literature. The paper begins by clarifying the role of citation analysis in...

When we take a cab we may feel cheated if the driver takes an unnecessarily long route despite the lack of a contract or promise to take the shortest possible path. Is our decision to take the cab affected by our belief that we may end up feeling cheated? Is the behavior of the driver affected...

Trust beliefs are heterogeneous across individuals and, at the same time, persistent across generations. We investigate one mechanism yielding these dual patterns: false consensus. In the context of a trust game experiment, we show that individuals extrapolate from their own type when forming...

The main aim of this paper is to demonstrate that a blend of welfare economics and statistical analysis is useful in the evaluation of the distribution of the citations received by scientific papers in the periodical literature. The paper begins by reviewing the connection between basic...

The inheritance of contemporary financial economics invites us to consider financial stability as integral to a liberal market setting. The crisis however demonstrated that financial markets may prove highly dysfunctional in the absence of adequate mechanisms of regulation and governance. This...

The currently fashionable theory of self-organisation has its origins in statistical physics. Many believe that the underlying physics model, which is based on inanimate systems, can be employed to explain and predict the emergence of social structures, even of history itself. Some are even...

We consider the decision of an agent with time inconsistent preferences to undertake an irreversible investment that yields an uncertain current benefit and a delayed cost. We show that, if the flow of information revealed between periods when the investment is postponed is sufficiently high,...

We analyze the decision of individuals with time inconsistent preferences who undertake irreversible activities yielding either a current cost and a future benefit or a current benefit and a future cost. We first show that, when benefits come earlier than costs, the individual faces a...