With Herb Gintis at SFI  (photo by Masahiko Aoki)

My research focuses on two areas (much of it conducted jointly with Herbert Gintis). The first concerns the co-evolution of preferences, institutions and behavior, with emphasis on the modeling and empirical study of cultural evolution, the importance and evolution of non-self-regarding motives in explaining behavior, and applications of these studies to policy areas such as intellectual property rights, the economics of education and the politics of government redistributive programs. Included are agent-based modeling and other studies of what I term “property rights revolutions.?Much of this research is carried out as part of the MacArthur Research Network on Preferences and in conjunction with the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute.

The second research area concerns the causes and consequences of economic inequality, with emphasis on the relationship between wealth inequalities, incomplete contracts, and governance of economic transactions in firms, markets, families and communities. Included are studies of the use and abuse of power in competitive exchange, the transmission of inequality across generations, wealth inequality as a source of allocative inefficiency, the very long term evolution of hierarchical institutions, transitions between egalitarian and unequal institutional regimes, and the relationship between globalization and redistribution. Much of this work is undertaken as part of the MacArthur Research Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic Performance which Pranab Bardhan and I co-head, as well as Behavioral Sciences Program of the Santa Fe Institute, which I direct.