The experimental study "Letting Down the Team? Social Effects of Team Incentives" by Philip Babcock and colleagues (2015) proposes that team incentives significantly enhance individual performance through social pressure and peer effects. The findings suggest that individuals are motivated by a...

The need to insure against idiosyncratic income risk leads to the formation of risksharing groups in village economies where formal financial markets are absent. We develop a theoretical model to address the impact of limited commitment and social control on the extent of informal risk sharing...

Authoritarian regimes often rely on targeting - unequal application of the law to isolate internal "enemies." At the same time, modern autocrats' methods of social control appear less draconian than those in the past. This study analyzes a dynamic model of authoritarian control. In the model, a...

Local governments suspected of Mafia infiltration can be dismissed in Italy through an administrative act not increasing formal deterrence but potentially signaling improved law enforcement among local communities. This paper finds that dismissals are associated to a persistent fall of petty...

Social control is a sociological idea which refers to a system that manages individual and group actions, prompting congruity and consistence with the policies of a given society or social gathering. In general, formal social control is communicated through law as statutes, decrees, and...

This paper provides empirical evidence of favoritism by agents, where that favoritism is generated by social pressure. To do so, we explore the behavior of professional soccer referees. Referees have discretion over the addition of extra time at the end of a soccer game (called injury time), to...

I develop a dynamic model with forward looking agents, and show that social pressure is effective in generating provision in a public good game: after a small group of agents start contributing to the public good, other agents decide to contribute as well due to a fear of being punished, and...

We study the functioning of informal value transfer systems (IVTS) with the example of Hawala. More precisely, we use computational experiments to study the roles of generalized trust and social control for the stability and efficiency of IVTS. Previous literature was ambiguous with regard to:...

"Recent innovations in digital technologies are fundamentally transforming the world of work. A digital gig economy is emerging that threatens to displace traditional labour relations based on legally regulated labour contracts. Companies like Uber, Deliveroo, or Amazon Mechanical Turk rely...

Local governments suspected of Mafia infiltration can be dismissed in Italy through an administrative act not increasing formal deterrence but potentially signaling improved law enforcement among local communities. This paper finds that dismissals are associated to a persistent fall of petty...

Networks powered by algorithms are pervasive. Major contemporary technology trends-Internet of Things, Big Data, Digital Platform Power, Blockchain, and the Algorithmic Society-are manifestations of this phenomenon. The internet, which once seemed an unambiguous benefit to society, is now the...

We test economic and sociological theories for the relationship between employment and crime, where social welfare is used as an identifying mechanism. We consider a sample of disadvantaged males from The Netherlands who are observed between ages 18 and 32 on a monthly time scale. We...

China is the largest country by smart phone user and Internet user. By 2017, China has over 1 billion smart phone users and over 70% of its entire population having access to the Internet.1 With severe State censorship and the Great Firewall of China, the worldwide social-media platforms such as...