The present article looks at the meaning of gift-giving when it is performed via free online recycling websites. Underpinned by research on the difficulties inherent to giving, our paper illustrates how these websites remove the difficulties inherent in giving to kith, kin or to charities.

Was colonization very costly for the metropole? This view has been widely accepted among French historians even though little empirical evidence has been provided. Using original data from the colonial budgets of French West Africa (AOF) this paper provides new insights into the actual colonial...

Since the independences, having a single currency is an official policy objective of West African countries. In April 2000, West African decisions-makers decided to accelerate the integration of the region by creating a second monetary zone in addition to the WAEMU (West African Economic and...

There are continuing efforts at the monetary integration and unionization in West Africa. Several academics argue that a monetary union among West African states would be costly because of the magnitude of asymmetric shocks. A common monetary policy is inappropriate and ineffective to respond to...

We provide the first theoretical analysis of altruism in networks. Agents are embedded in a fixed, weighted network and care about their direct friends. Given some initial distribution of incomes, they may decide to support their poorer friends. We study the resulting non-cooperative transfer...

Depuis quelques années, les réseaux sociaux et les usages qu'ils nourrissent ont pris une place significative au sein de la galaxie Internet. Parmi ces réseaux, ceux qui pratiquent la gratuité pour les utilisateurs finals n'ont pas encore stabilisé leur modèle économique et ce, malgré...

Ce rapport de recherche est une synthèse de la littérature en sciences sociales abordant la question de la régulation formelle des communautés en ligne, en particulier celles des sites de réseaux sociaux, de partage de vidéos, de "fanfictions", les communautés open-source, open-media, les...

Despites the great interest caused by social networks in Business Science, their analysis is rarely performed both in a global and systematic way in this field: most authors focus on parts of the studied network, or on a few nodes considered individually. This could be explained by the fact that...

The purpose of this paper is to offer customer relationship insights in what is a fast developing new e-commerce development strategy. We examine the potential synergies between digital social networks (DSN) and e-commerce websites, thus bringing e-commerce and DSN websites into the same...

This case study is made from an action-research intervention in a very huge multinational company of telecommunications. The objectives of the projects were to change the miond (attitudes, behavior and competences) of all these people who work in software development in the company (several...