We develop an evolutionary model of growth in which agents choose how to allocate their time between private and social activities. We argue that a shift from social to private activities may foster market-based growth, but also generate social poverty. Within a formal framework that merges a...

In this paper, we develop a simple model of social dynamics governing the evolution of strategic self-protection choices of boundedly rational potential victims facing the threat of prospective offenders in a large population with random matching. We prove that individual (and socially...

In this paper, we study the cultural geography of the Veneto Region on the basis of a pseudo-diffusion approach to the analysis of the inherent semantic spatial data. We find somewhat surprising results, and, in particular, that Venice, indisputably the Region's cultural hub in terms of...

We introduce social capital accumulation into a neoclassical model, showing how it differs from physical and human capital accumulation. We take the view that social capital is crucial to the enjoyment of socially provided goods and that it is mainly accumulated by means of participation to...

We consider a partnership game with two roles in which a large population of firms interact to carry out, say, R&D joint ventures. The partners have to build a common-property asset through a sequence of costly investments. Firms have access to a monitoring technology whose cost depends on the...

Restructuring firms in a transition economy produces a sort of network externality, in that the profitability of restructuring depends on the number of firms that already adopted this strategy. We investigate under what conditions a ''critical mass'' exists, i.e. a situation in which such...

In this paper we study an oligopoly game with a differentiated product using a dynamic evolutionary approach. Firms are allowed to choose between quantity setting and price setting behavior. We find that, under both classical interaction structures, namely 'random mating' and 'paying the field'....

After reviewing recent and less recent literature on altruism and selfishness, the paper discusses in detail the isuue of the relevance og altuistic motivations, as opposed to self-interest, in a well grounded theory of rational choice. The main point is that a proper dynamical analysis of the...

This paper is meant as a discussion of different methodological approaches to the analysis of corporate social responsibility (CSR), sorted out through a scrutiny of the literature that has emerged from the recent Italian debate. The first stream of literature is embedded in the neo-classical...