Management scholars have long stressed the importance of evolutionary processsesfor inter-firm cooperation but have mostly missed the promising opportunityto incorporate ideas from evolutionary theories into the analysis of collaborativearrangements. In this paper, we first present three rules...

This paper lays out an evolutionary theory for the cognitive foundations and cultural emergenceof the extravagant displays (e.g., ritual mutilation, animal sacrifice, and martyrdom) that have sooften tantalized social scientists, as well as more mundane actions that influence cultural...

The paper gives attention to the question of whether the development of evolutionarytheories in biology over the last twenty years has any implications for evolutionaryeconomics. Though criticisms of Darwin and the modern synthesis have alwaysexisted, most of them have not been widely accepted...

The importance of political institutions for economic growth and social well-being has been demonstrated in a number of studies. Societies in which agents trust that other agents will collaborate in establishing and maintaining efficient institutions produce more social benefits. Yet there is...

Why do individuals engage in personally costly, partisan activities that benefit others? If individuals act according to rational self-interest, then partisan activity occurs only when the benefits of that activity exceed its costs. However, laboratory experiments suggest that many people are...

We investigated the effect of religion on generosity, interpersonal trust, and cooperation by using games developed by experimental economists (Dictator, Trust, and Public Goods). In these experiments, individuals were paired or grouped with unknown strangers to test the degree to which religion...

Decline and break-up of institutionalized cooperation, at all levels, has occurred frequently. Some of its concomitants, such as international migration, have become topical in the globalized world. Aspects of the phenomenon have also become known as failing states. However, the focus in most...