331 papers
Econ — Th explores the theoretical foundations of economics, where researchers use mathematical models to understand how markets function, how people make decisions, and what drives complex financial systems. This field moves beyond simple data collection to build the logical frameworks that explain why economies grow, stagnate, or face crises, offering a deeper look at the invisible rules that shape our daily lives.
On Gist.Science, we process every new preprint in this category directly from arXiv as soon as it appears. Our team transforms these dense academic manuscripts into accessible, plain-language summaries alongside detailed technical overviews, ensuring that both experts and curious readers can grasp the latest theoretical breakthroughs without getting lost in jargon.
Below you will find the most recent additions to our collection, featuring the newest theoretical insights shaping the future of economic thought.
This paper argues that divide-and-conquer tactics succeed primarily through epistemic friction, where bystanders misinterpret an aggressor's initial attack as a localized grievance rather than a systemic campaign, leading them to withhold support and allowing the victim to be isolated and defeated.
This paper redefines the consumer as a bounded information channel that compresses choices into probability distributions, demonstrating that downward-sloping demand emerges naturally from budget constraints and attention limits rather than perfect rationality, while recovering standard Walrasian demand as the limit of unlimited attention.
This paper presents a simpler proof, based on a least-squares characterization, demonstrating that scoring rules are equivalent to cosine similarity rules by showing that the arithmetic mean of score vectors uniquely minimizes total squared Euclidean distance.
This paper investigates the bifurcation mechanism driving the emergence of twin cities around a central hub in a long, narrow economy with evenly distributed locations, validating the analysis through established economic geography models and applying it to historical population shifts in Japan's Main Island.
This paper analyzes a multi-strategy network game involving conformists, rebels, and stubborn agents to establish conditions for the existence of pure strategy Nash equilibria, demonstrating that such equilibria are likely on specific network structures but almost surely fail to exist in large random networks due to the prevalence of conflicting conformist-rebel interactions.
This paper proposes an operator-spectral framework that identifies a "fragility edge" in market data, demonstrating that while it cannot precisely predict bubbles or pinpoint specific assets, it reliably detects the strengthening of a dominant market factor and the collapse of independent factors that coincide with global equity crises.
This paper characterizes sufficientarian grading rules and the total preorders they induce based on binary grading functions, while also defining additional rankings using sufficiency-gap information and demonstrating that specific inclusive and strategy-proof protocols, such as simple majority, can be used to select a particular grading rule.
This paper employs mechanism design to characterize the optimal allocation of positional goods, demonstrating that revenue-maximizing mechanisms fully separate buyers while single-level selling guarantees substantial revenue and can enhance consumer surplus under specific failure rate conditions.
This paper demonstrates that while a standard inflation-targeting Taylor rule controls the price level, it often leads to inefficient monetary equilibria in overlapping generations economies, whereas a rule incorporating both an inflation ceiling and a relative aggregate real savings floor successfully guides the economy toward efficient monetary equilibria.
This paper proposes a unified framework to compare various models of social comparison, finding that laboratory data on "Keeping up with the Joneses" and Veblen motivations are best explained by a Prospect Theory-based model that contrasts envy and pride through upward and downward comparisons.