The constraint on informal finance is commonly taken to be high costs and limited supply. But the majority of informal investors – family and friends – is often willing to supply funds at negative returns, and yet many borrowers tap family and friends only as a last resort. We explain this...

We test whether generosity is related to political preferences and partisanship in Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States using incentivized dictator games. The total sample consists of more than 5,000 respondents. We document that support for social spending and redistribution...

I establish a positive relationship between family ties and civic virtues, as captured by disapproval of tax and benefit cheating, corruption, and a range of other dimensions of exploiting others for personal gain. I find that family ties are a complement to social capital, using within country...

Bergin and Lipman (1996) show that the refinement effect from the random mutations in the adaptive population dynamics in Kandori, Mailath and rob (1993) and Young (1993) is due to restrictions on how these mutation rates vary across population states. We here model mutation rates as...

No abstract.

Evolutionary theorizing has a long tradition in economics. Only recently has this approach been brought into the framework of non-cooperative game theory. Evolutionary game theory studies the robustness of strategic behaviour with respect to evolutionary forces in the context of games played...

We survey the literature on social networks by putting together the economics, sociological and physics/applied mathematics approaches, showing their similarities and differences. We expose, in particular, the two main ways of modeling network formation. While the physics/applied mathematics...