We investigate the importance of Veblen effects on work hours, namely the manner in which a desire to emulate the consumption standards of the rich influences individuals' allocation of time between labor and leisure. Our model of the choice of work hours captures Veblen effects by taking...

Under what conditions can class divisions characterized by high levels of inequality be designated evolutionary universals, using Talcott Parsons's term to refer to social arrangements which have emerged independently and persisted in a wide variety of environments? To explore this question, I...

We jointly address two puzzles, namely what accounts for the evolutionary success of both: (a) individually costly and group-beneficial forms of human sociality towards non-kin; and (b) those group-level institutional structures such as food sharing and monogamy which have emerged and diffused...

This paper provides a unified framework for studying the effects of economic (and other) institutions on the evolution of preferences, taking account of conformist cultural transmission, social segregation, and the simultaneous operation of selection processes at the individual and group level....

Where genetically unrelated members of a group benefit from mutual adherence to a social norm, agents may obey the norm and punish its violators, even when this behavior cannot be justified in terms of self-regarding, outcome-oriented preferences. We call this strong reciprocity. We distinguish...

Monitoring by peers in work teams, credit associations, partner- ships, local commons situations, and residential neighborhoods is often an effective means of attenuating incentive problems. Most explanations of the incentives to engage in mutual monitoring rely either on small group size or on...

Networks such as ethnic credit associations, close-knit residential neighborhoods, "old boy' networks, and ethnically linked businesses play an important role in economic life but have been little studied by economists. These networks are often supported by cultural distinctions between insiders...

We propose an explanation of cooperation among unrelated members of a social group, in which providing group benefits evolves because it constitutes an honest signal of the member's quality as a mate, coalition partner or competitor, and therefore results in advantageous alliances for those...

Social capital generally refers to trust, concern for one's associates, a willingness to live by the norms of one's community and to punish those who do not. While essential to good governance, these behaviors and dispositions appear to conflict with the fundamental behavioral assumptions of...

Experimental behavioral scientists have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in over a hundred experiments from around the world. Prior research cannot determine whether this uniformity results from universal patterns of behavior, or from the...