Herbert Gintis

Posts About

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  Signals and Incentives in Blockchain Applications

  Since Bitcoin’s invention in 2009, permissionless blockchain technology has gone through several waves of interest and development. While applications related to payments have advanced at breakneck speed, progress in financial and nonmonetary applications have largely failed to live up to initial excitement. This chapter considers the incentives facing network participants . . .
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  Inside and Outside Perspectives on Institutions: An Economic Theory of the Noble Lie

  If there exist no incentive or selective mechanisms that make cooperation in large groups incentive-compatible under realistic circumstances, functional social institutions will require a divergence between subjective preferences and objective payoffs – a “noble lie”. This implies the existence of irreducible and irreconcilable “inside” and “outside” perspectives on social institutions; . . .
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  Money and its Institutional Substitutes: The Role of Exchange Institutions in Human Cooperation

  This paper offers an increasing returns model of the evolution of exchange institutions building on Smith’s dictum that “the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market”. Exchange institutions are characterized by a tradeoff between fixed and marginal costs: the effort necessary to execute an exchange may . . .
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  Christianity, Cooperation, and State Formation

  Human cooperation, I’ve argued before, is remarkable and unlikely. Even more remarkable is that it ever got beyond the tribal scale of a couple dozen to a couple hundred people, given that the institutions necessary to sustain cooperation at that scale are very different from those necessary to sustain anonymous . . .
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  Self-Interest is the Basis of Self-Denial: On Cooperative Equilibria and the Capacity for Commitment

  A second pass at the themes in The Meta Level Doesn’t Justify Itself. I’ll roll the two together at some point in the indefinite future. Imagine you need money, and somehow you find yourself sitting across from Warren Buffet pitching a new business venture. From a purely self-interested perspective, your best scenario . . .