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The use of social sanctions against behaviour which contradicts a set of informal rules is often an important element in the functioning of informal institutions in traditional societies. In the social sciences, sanctioning behaviour has often been explained in terms of the internalisation of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010443374
This paper reviews the literature concerning the evolution of cultural traits in general and preferences in particular, and the emergence and persistence of rules or norms, from a family per-spective. In models where every new person is effectively the clone of an existing one (either a parent...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012657932
Why do some societies fail to adopt more efficient political and economic institutions in response to changing economic conditions? And why do such conditions sometimes generate conservative ideological backlashes and, at other times, progressive social and political movements? We propose an...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011984514
Why do some societies fail to adopt more efficient institutions in response to changing economic conditions? And why do such conditions sometimes generate ideological backlashes and at other times lead to transformative sociopolitical movements? We propose an explanation that highlights the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011653431
Declining general trust has become a serious social issue in China in recent years. This paper attempts to understand and analyze this social phenomenon from a social interaction perspective. Based on a repeated prisoners´ dilemma game on networks, it finds that the evolution of general trust...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010513002
Interdependencies in consumer behavior stem from either status-seeking consumption or compliance with social norms. This paper analyzes how a consumption act changes from a means to signal the consumer's status to a means of norm compliance. It is shown that such a transformation can only be...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010267166
We study environments in which agents are randomly matched to play a Prisoner's Dilemma, and each player observes a few of the partner's past actions against previous opponents. We depart from the existing related literature by allowing a small fraction of the population to be commitment types....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012057421
We study impersonal exchange, and ask how agents can behave honestly in anonymous transactions without contracts. We analyze repeated anonymous random matching games, where agents observe only their own transactions. Little is known about cooperation in this setting beyond the prisoner's...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012215292
Community enforcement is an important device for sustaining efficiency in some repeated games of cooperation. We investigate cooperation when information about players' reputations spreads to their future partners through links in a social network that connects them. We find that information...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011928009
This paper analyses the connection between legal origins and generalized trust. Based on recent results of institutions and trust research it argues that legal origins and trust are connected via the beliefs of agents. Next, it develops hypotheses about a complex and self-reinforcing causal...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010309357