Status Competition and Resource Misallocation: The Collective Cost of Positional Goods
Why everyone spending more to get ahead leaves everyone exactly where they started, with less
Behavioral Dimensions of Bureaucracy: Why Red Tape Persists
How individually rational caution aggregates into collectively irrational complexity through self-reinforcing behavioral loops
The Emergence of Money: A Behavioral Account of Spontaneous Order
How decentralized behavioral choices created monetary systems—and why those systems remain perpetually vulnerable to collapse
Behavioral Barriers to Climate Action: Why Knowledge Doesn't Change Behavior
Understanding why information fails to generate climate action—and what intervention design must address instead
The Behavioral Microfoundations of Discrimination: How Individual Bias Becomes Systemic
Individual biases compound through networks and institutions into self-perpetuating systems of inequality
The Behavioral Economics of Queuing: Why We Wait and How Waiting Changes Us
How the psychology of waiting reveals our deepest patterns of temporal reasoning, fairness perception, and irrational commitment.
Information Cascades and the Rationality of Ignoring Evidence
Why discarding your own evidence can be rational—and why that rationality makes collective knowledge fragile
Social Learning Gone Wrong: How Imitation Produces Suboptimal Equilibria
Why copying what works can lock populations into behaviors that demonstrably don't.
Threshold Models of Collective Action: Why Revolutions Surprise Everyone Including Revolutionaries
Individual action thresholds aggregate into collective dynamics that surprise everyone—including those who create them.
The Paradox of Voting: Why Rational Choice Theory Fails Electoral Behavior
Why millions engage in an act that rational choice theory says should not occur—and what this reveals about human motivation.
Behavioral Foundations of Organizational Dysfunction: Why Companies Make Predictable Mistakes
Organizations fail predictably because individual incentives and structural features interact to produce systematic pathologies.
Preference Falsification and Institutional Collapse: Why Stable Systems Fail Suddenly
Surface consensus masks systemic fragility when private dissent accumulates invisibly beneath public compliance.
Herding Behavior in Expert Communities: Why Specialists Follow Rather Than Lead
Inside the incentive structures that transform independent expertise into collective conformity—and why consensus may be weaker evidence than it appears.
The Behavioral Foundations of Market Bubbles: When Collective Irrationality Is Individually Rational
Understanding why sophisticated investors knowingly buy overpriced assets reveals the structural incentives that make collective irrationality the rational individual choice.
Why Cooperation Emerges From Selfish Agents: The Architecture of Trust Networks
How temporal shadows, network structure, and reputation cascades engineer cooperation without requiring anyone to transcend self-interest.
The Tragedy of the Commons Reconsidered: When Common Resources Sustain Themselves
Why centuries-old fisheries thrive while modern commons collapse—the institutional architecture that transforms inevitable tragedy into sustainable cooperation.
Coordination Failures: Why Groups Fail Even When Everyone Wants Success
Discover why aligned intentions still produce collective failure, and learn the hidden architecture of expectations that determines whether groups succeed or collapse.
Network Contagion: How Behaviors Spread Through Social Systems Like Diseases
Understanding why some behaviors need one recommendation while others require a dozen changes everything about how we spread ideas
The Architecture of Polarization: How Moderate Populations Become Extreme
Discover why networks naturally divide and what structural forces transform mild disagreements into tribal warfare—beyond individual psychology.