Taking value as the socio-economic analogue of biological or cultural fitness, in this paper I start a study of the interaction between individual-level and group-level explanatory mechanisms by looking for what kind of intra-group relationships obtains given the nature of inter-group...

This paper introduces a notion of exploitation according to which participants in a cooperative production process are exploited to the extent that their earnings coincide with what they would earn from independent participation in the production process. This notion is then used to show that,...

Starting from the observation that surplus-value is almost always due to the collective undertaking of non additively separable human capital investments, this paper introduces a theory of the institutional structure of production where groups are taken as units of analysis in a multi-level...

this paper combines the economic concept of specific investment with anthropological evidence on three early human societies –the disbanding groups of pre-anatomically modern humans, the huntergatherers’ egalitarian communities, and the primitive states or chiefdoms. This combination is...

this paper provides a counterexample to a famous theorem of Aumann (1976) which states that common priors and common knowledge of the posteriors imply that the latter must be identical. This theorem, also known as an ‘agreement theorem’ after the title of the original paper, is based on the...