The Prisoner Dilemma is a typical structure of interaction in human societies. In spite of a long tradition dealing with the matter from different perspectives, the emergence of cooperation or defection still remains a controversial argument from both empirical and theoretical point of views. In...

We demonstrate that in models where agents have concerns for status the model predictions can drastically change depending on whether status is modelled as an ordinal or cardinal magnitude. As a proof, we show that two well known theoretical findings are not robust to the substitution of ordinal...

In this paper I apply stochastic stability to compare local information to global information in terms of welfare. Under global information agents potentially imitate anyone else, while under local information choices are grouped into information sets and agents can observe and hence imitate...

In this paper I provide a descriptive model of choice over time by a population of constrained maximizing agents. Agents’ choice sets are markovian in the sense that they depend on previous choices. The unperturbed dynamics turns out to be trapped into local maxima whatever the length of...

This papers investigates the efficiency of aggregate choice in the long run when the individual decision is driven by both personal experience and imitation. Personal experience is represented by choice sets depending upon previous choices. Imitation is modeled first through popularity weighting...

Numerous contributions in the last decades are based on similar inspiratory principles, which, at least if considered altogether, are highly innovative with respect to the existing tradition in economics. This paper is a perspective and speculative guess aiming at identifying the gist of this...

We investigate the relationship between social participation and the hours worked in the market. Social participation is the component of social capital that measures individuals’ engament in groups, associations and non-governmental organizations. We provide a model of consumer choice where...

In this paper we empirically investigate the relationship between social capital and the supply of labor. We identify social capital with non-market relationships. Data are obtained from the US General Social Survey for the period 1976-2004. We find evidence that social capital affects the...

Most popular explanations of the happiness paradox cannot fully account for the lack of growth in U.S. reported well-being during the last thirty years (Blanchflower and Oswald (2004)). In this paper we test an alternative hypothesis, namely that the decline in U.S. social capital is responsible...

This paper investigates how the distribution of land property rights affects industrial take-off and aggregate income through the demand side. We study a stylized two sectors economy where the manufacturing sector is assumed to be constituted by a continuum of small markets producing distinct...