The enforcement of social norms often requires that unaffected third parties sanction offenders. Given the renewed interest of economists in norms, the literature on third party punishment is surprisingly thin, however. In this paper, we report on the results of an experiment designed to...

New networking technologies such as wireless mobile grids and peer-to-peer middleware are examples of a growing class of open distributed systems whose strength is the absence of a central controlling instance and which function through the cooperation of autonomous entities that voluntarily...

Based on the variable rate of gross domestic product per capita growth and its sources, this paper first identifies five phases of economic development that are common to China, Japan, and Korea: M (Malthusian), G (government-led), K (à la Kuznets), H (human capital based) and PD (post...

The main objective of this paper is to analyse some aspects of Japanese policy in the post World War-II period and understand how the various informal institutions (shared mental models) have influenced key dimensions of technology strategy with regard to the nature and trajectory of activities...

We consider a dynamic model of conformity that permits both a conformist and non-conformist equilibrium. We provide conditions under which conformity can 'invade' a population. More precisely, starting from a non-conformist equilibrium, we show that the conformity of an arbitrarily small...

Charitable fundraisers frequently announce giving by others, and research shows that this can increase donations. However, this mechanism may not put information about peers to the most efficient use if it is costly to inform individuals who are indifferent to peer actions or causes some...

The median income of Asian households is the highest of all racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. In a laboratory experiment, we examine whether Asians are more willing to compete and have greater competitive preferences than non-Asians. Both with and without controls for performance, performance...