Behaviour

• *NEW* Patel, Amrish, and Edward Cartwright (2009), Social Norms and Naive Beliefs. Available at RePEc here. This paper analyses the effect that naive agents (those who take behavior at "face value") have on the nature of social norms After reviewing the use of signalling models to model conformity, it argues in favour of modelling naïve inferences in tandem with standard Bayes rational inferences.
• Rowthorn, Robert E., Ricardo Andres Guzman, and Carlos Rodriguez-Sickert (2009), "Theories of the evolution of cooperative behaviour: A critical survey plus some new results", Munich Personal RePEc Archive, http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/12574/. This paper surveys the various theories of cooperative behaviour, and we describe our own effort to integrate these theories into a self-contained framework.
• Benabou, Roland (2009), "Groupthink: Collective Delusion in Organisations and Markets", NBER Working Paper No. 14764. A model of (individually rational) collective reality denial in groups, organizations and markets. When an agent can expect to benefit from other's delusions, this makes him more of a realist; when he is more likely to suffer losses from them this pushes him toward denial, which becomes contagious. This general "Mutually Assured Delusion" principle can give rise to multiple social cognitions of reality, irrespective of any strategic payoff interactions or private signals.