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Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Prologue -- One: Kasiel Skolnick -- Two: Home Kids -- Three: Rue des Beaux-Arts -- Four: Home Kids-Two -- Photos -- Five: Arlington Park -- Six: Apple Tree Lane -- Seven: University Circle -- Eight: Lake Shore Drive -- Epilogue: Yad Vashem -- Acknowledgments -- Select Bibliography

"For several decades, the orthodox economics approach to understanding choice under risk has been to assume that each individual person maximizes some sort of personal utility function defined over purchasing power. This new volume contests that even the best wisdom from the orthodox theory is inadequate, and proposes the return to a simpler sort of scientific theory of risky choice"--

Authors Daniel Friedman and Barry Sinervo show how to use theoretical developments in evolutionary game theory to build useful models describing parts of the worlds we live in - the natural world of biology, the social world of politics, economics, etc., and the virtual world that is emerging from our connected electronic devices.

Table of Contents Prologue: A Tale of Two Tilts I. TWO HALVES OF THE BALANCE 1. The Savanna Code: What Good Are Morals? 2. The Rise of Wealth: How We Became Civilized and Started Shopping II. WORLDS OUT OF KILTER 3. From Melqart to Zombieworld: Adventures in Imbalance 4. Madness, Lies, and Crashes: When Prices Run Free 5. Blundering Back To Balance: TARP and Tear Gas 6. China: Morals and the Rush to Wealth III. LIFE AROUND US 7. From Hudson's Bay to eBay: Why Some People Like Going to Work 8. Markets and Sin: Murder, Mega-Casinos, and Drug Wars 9. Underworlds: The Tao of Gangs 10. Cooling the Earth: The Preservation Markets 11. The World Ahead

Friedman and McNeill draw on recent research in evolutionary gametheory and behavioral economics to explore the relationship between our moral codesand our market systems. They show how imbalance between morals and markets is at theroot of the recent corporate scandals in the US as well as the global financialcrisis the world continues to face.

We study prisoners' dilemmas played in continuous time with flow payoffs accumulated over 60 seconds. In most cases, the median rate of mutual cooperation is about 90 percent. Control sessions with repeated matchings over eight subperiods achieve less than half as much cooperation, and cooperation rates approach zero in one-shot sessions. In follow-up sessions with a variable number of subperiods, cooperation rates increase nearly linearly as the grid size decreases, and, with one-second subperiods, they approach continuous levels. Our data support a strand of theory that explains how capacity to respond rapidly stabilizes cooperation and destabilizes defection in the prisoner's dilemma. (JEL C72, C78, C91)