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We consider a dynamic economy in which agents are repeatedly matched and decide whether or not to form profitable partnerships. Each agent has a physical color and a social color. An agent's social color acts as a signal, conveying information about the physical color of agents in his partnership history. Before an agent makes a decision, he observes his match's physical and social colors. Neither the physical color nor the social color is payoff relevant. We identify environments where equilibria arise in which agents condition their decisions on the physical and social colors of their potential partners. That is, they discriminate. (JEL C78, D82, J15, J71, Z13)

Abstract
Drawing insights from the literature and from the author's own survey work on contractual practices among manufacturers and traders in Africa, we study the transition from anonymous to personal to impersonal exchange. Using a dynamic game with heterogenous agents and information sharing, we derive precise conditions under which relational contracting spontaneously emerges and deters opportunistic breach even in the absence of formal market institutions. Exclusion of cheaters is not required for contracting to begin. As exchange develops, newcomers may be excluded from contracting when screening costs are high and agents long lived. Reputational equilibria in which cheaters are permanently excluded are not decentralizable unless contracting is already developed and breach of contract is interpreted as a sign of impending bankruptcy.

Three experiments examined whether people spontaneously generate evaluations of target individuals under circumstances in which they are also known to generate spontaneous trait inferences (STIs). The first experiment used a standard savings-in-relearning paradigm to explore whether exposure to trait-implicative behavior descriptions facilitates the learning of evaluatively-congruent, as well as behavior-implied, personality traits. Evidence for the facilitated learning of evaluatively-congruent traits was not obtained. This led to a second experiment in which the savings-in-relearning paradigm was altered to directly assess participants' relearning of evaluative words (good/bad). The results demonstrated that the same trait-implicative behavioral stimuli can produce both spontaneous trait inferences and spontaneous evaluations when both are measured correctly. Both of these outcomes were replicated in a third study using a false recognition paradigm. The implications of these findings for impression formation processes and for the possible independence of semantic information and evaluative information are discussed.