On the nature, modeling, and neural bases of social ties

Purpose: This paper addresses the nature, formalization, and neural bases of (affective) social ties anddiscusses the relevance of ties for health economics. A social tie is defined as an affectiveweight attached by an individual to the well-being of another individual ('utilityinterdependence'). Ties can be positive or negative, and symmetric or asymmetric betweenindividuals. Characteristic of a social tie, as conceived of here, is that it develops over timeunder the influence of interaction, in contrast with a trait like altruism. Moreover, a tie is notrelated to strategic behavior such as reputation formation but seen as generated by affectiveresponses.Methodology/approach: A formalization is presented together with some supportive evidence from behavioralexperiments. This is followed by a discussion of related psychological constructs and thepresentation of suggestive existing neural findings. To help prepare the grounds for a modelbasedneural analysis some speculations on the neural networks involved are provided, togetherwith suggestions for future research. Findings: Social ties are not only found to be important from an economic viewpoint, it is also shownthat they can be modeled and related to neural substrates.