In randomized control laboratory experiments, we find that those primed to think about markets exhibit more trusting behavior. We randomly and unconsciously prime experimental participants to think about markets and trade. We then ask them to play a trust game involving an anonymous stranger. We...

Coordination games have become a critical tool of analysis in fields such as development and institutional economics. Understanding behavior in coordination games is an important step towards understanding the differing success of teams, firms and nations. This paper investigates the...

Many studies have looked at how individual player traits influence individual choice in the repeated prisoner’s dilemma, but few studies have looked at how the average traits of pairs of players influence the average choices of pairs. We consider cognitive ability, patience, risk tolerance,...

In recent years, a peculiar phenomenon has happened time and time again and aroused hot social discussions in China. It is the fact that when an old man (or woman) falls down on the street, most passers-by dare not to help him, or in other cases, when one of them does offer his (or her) help, he...

This paper focuses on the relationship between the concept of social capital and the role of the civl economy as source of pro-social values and norms that constitute the individuals determinants of social capital.

Social institutions were often founded by the elite to avoid social upheavals. Institutions helped mitigate the threat of violent social responses to labor-saving innovations. But their organizational forms were influenced by preexisting cultural and social factors. The differences in Chinese...

This paper presents an index of institutionalized social technologies covering its two main dimensions namely Risk reducing technologies and Anti Rent seeking technologies and in turn covers several social, institutional, political and economic aspects. Specifically it attempted to classify and...

In this paper, we provide a new framework for analyzing corruption in public bureaucracies. The standard way to model corruption is as an example of moral hazard, which then leads to a focus on better monitoring and stricter penalties with the eradication of corruption as the final goal. We...

The paper explores the link between authoritative media, which is called the public court in the paper, and economic prosperity. Three types of evidence are used. First, arguments of the superiority of the public court over traditional media are provided. Second, a formal model shows a causal...

This paper proposes a theory of sharecropping on the basis of price behavior in agriculture and imperfectly competitive nature of rural product markets. First we show the superiority of sharecropping over fixed rental contracts in a benchmark landlord–tenant model with seasonal variation of...