The importance of social trust on economic growth has been suggested by many empirical works. This paper formalizes the concept of social trust and studies its formation process in a game theoretic setting. It provides plausible explanations for a wide range of empirical and experimental...

In this paper, the link between community enforcement and co-operation in environments where trust is required is investigated. For this purpose, an assymetric trust game in which peer-to-peer sanctioning mechanisms are available is considered. Firstly, the outcome of this game is characterised...

Why are there such large differences in living arrangements across Western European countries? Conventional economic analyses have not been successful in explaining differences in living arrangements and particularly the dramatic increase in the fraction of young adults living with their parents...

We model how excess demand or excess supply can be generated in the presence of a social network of interactions, where agents are subject to external information and individual incentives. In this context we study price fluctuations in financial markets under equilibrium. In particular, we...

In this paper we adopt Granovetter's view expressed in his famous article ''Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness'' , where he argues that the concept of man in economics is extremely undersocialized because it ignores the importance of social networks. In so doing...

In this paper a public bureau can extract surplus value from the services it provides not only by misrepresenting its production costs to its oversight committee but also by influencing the perceptions of the legislative body such as the parliament or the congress and the public at large by...

This paper presents a participation game experiment to study the impact of uncertainty and costly political participation on the incidence of reform. Fernandez and Rodrik (1991) show that uncertainty about who will ultimately gain or lose as a result of a reform can prevent its adoption. We...

Recent terrorist attacks such as the attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 have generated new interest in the debate on capital punishment. It has been suggested that support for the death penalty could be higher in the wake of terrorist activity. Using data from the Australian...

We offer a simple general equilibrium model to analyze how economy-wide forces (i.e. shocks to terms of trade, technology and endowments) will affect the intensity of social conflict over the distribution of resources. Examples of conflict activities range from crime to civil war. We show that...

In this paper we model the interaction between parties and candidates to highlight the mechanisms by which parties selecting candidates may discipline legislators. Parties are long-lived institutions providing incentives to short-lived candidates. Citizens have preferences over a multimentional...