Recent insights from the ‘embodied cognition’ perspective in cognitive science, supported by neural research, provide a basis for a ‘methodological interactionism’ that transcends both the methodological individualism of economics and the methodological collectivism of (some) sociology,...

This chapter reviews some key points in the analysis of trust, based on Nooteboom (2002)i.The following questions are addressed.What can we have trust in?What is the relation between trust and control?What are the sources of trust? And what are its limits?By what process is trust built up and...

I start this contribution with an overview of my personal involvement—as an Operations Research consultant—in several engineering case-studies that may raise ethical questions; these case studies employ simulation models. Next, I present an overview of the recent literature on ethical issues...

Networks can have an important effect on economic outcomes. Given the complexity of many of these networks, agents will generally not know their structure. We study the sensitivity of game-theoretic predictions to the specification of players’ (common) prior on the network in a setting where...

This paper estimates the price of ethics by studying the risk-return relation in socially responsible investment (SRI) funds. Consistent with investors paying a price for ethics, SRI funds in many European and Asia-Pacific countries strongly underperform domestic benchmark portfolios by about 5%...

This paper analyzes data for a random sample drawn from the Dutch population who reveal their propensity to invest and reward investments in building up social capital by means of an economic experiment.We find substantial heterogeneity and asymmetries in the propensity to invest and in the...

Networks can have an important effect on economic outcomes. Given the complexity of many of these networks, agents will generally not know their structure. We study the sensitivity of game-theoretical predictions to the specification of players’ (common) prior on the network in a setting where...

In this paper we develop a formal model of economic growth and two types of social capital. Following extant literature, we model social capital as participation in two types of social networks: first, closed networks of family and friends, and, second, open networks that bridge different...

A random intersection graph is constructed by independently assigning each vertex a subset of a given set and drawing an edge between two vertices if and only if their respective subsets intersect. In this paper a model is developed in which each vertex is given a random weight, and vertices...

In many contexts, players interact only with a subset of the whole population, i.e., players interact on a network. This paper a setting in which players are located on a network and play a fixed game with their neighbors. Players have incomplete information on the network structure. They have a...