Seminario CEDE - José Alberto Guerra

Formal rules can only partially reduce opportunistic behavior in human interactions. Cooperative or pro-social behavior, arising as a social norm and enforced by third parties (often at a personal cost) is therefore essential to achieve desirable social outcomes. But social norms do not always promote efficient outcomes. We study one particularly pernicious social norm (the "no sea sapo norm", as it is referred to in Colombia) that breaks the enforcement mechanism through third-party punishment: it dictates people to mind their own business and not snitch on others.

Seminario CEDE - Jorge Castro

La psicología ha identificado cómo las personas suelen reemplazar procesos de decisión complejos con reglas sencillas llamadas heurísticas. En particular la formación de expectativas sobre el precio futuro puede ser un proceso complejo que se puede reemplazar utilizando únicamente los precios más recientes o incluso solo el último disponible. En este documento se estudia el efecto de estas heurísticas en la función de oferta agrícola.

Seminario CEDE - Andrés Zambrano

This paper models an entrepreneur's choice between investing in a safe activity or experimenting with a new risky one, and how much to invest in \entrepreneurial capital" that permits more effective use of arriving information on the latter- how much to learn how to learn. Optimal investment depends on the cost, the distance from the entrepreneurial frontier, and non-monotonically, on the expected return on the risky activity, leading to three learning regimes including a potential resource curse.