Associate Professor in Political Science @ Brown University​

David Skarbek

This class examines how institutions structure and affect economic and political activities. We will study a number of models to understand how individuals and groups act in social dilemmas and how the consequences change under different institutional settings. We will discus the collective action problem, prisoner’s dilemma, coordination problem, knowledge problem, preference falsification, slippery slopes, information cascades, signaling theory, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, voting models, and Madison’s dilemma. The class covers some (but by no means all) of the major thinkers and works in this tradition of political economy and uses their ideas to better understand markets, society, and states.