This chapter provides an introduction to social economics, the study, with the methods of economics, of social phenomena in which aggregates affect individual choices. Such phenomena include social norms and conventions, cultural identities and stereotypes, peer and neighborhood effects,...

This paper presents a survey of the theoretical and empirical literature on cultural transmission and socialization. It has been prepared for the Handbook of Social Economics , edited by Jess Benhabib, Alberto Bisin, and Matt Jackson, to be published by Elsevier Science in 2010.

We examine, with the tools of economics, a fundamental tenet of some of the most recent theoretical work in sociology, which we refer to as the Postmodernist Critique : preferences are socially constructed, firms exploit their monopoly power through advertising in order to create new (false)...