Social interactions provide a set of incentives for regulating individual behavior. Chief among these is stigma, the status loss and discrimination that results from the display of stigmatized attributes or behaviors. The stigmatization of behavior is the enforcement mechanism behind social...

Local interactions refer to social and economic phenomena where individuals' choices are influenced by the choices of others who are close to them socially or geographically. This represents a fairly accurate picture of human experience. Furthermore, since local interactions imply particular...

In human societies, overcoming incentives to act selfishly is immensely important so as to promote prosocial behaviours. Social norms and relational utility, utility generated by such feelings as guilt, are mechanisms by which cooperation and coordination can be facilitated. Here we add...

Social interactions provide a set of incentives for regulating individual behavior. Chief among these is stigma, the status loss and discrimination that results from the display of stigmatized attributes or behaviors. The stigmatization of behavior is the enforcement mechanism behind social...

We provide a theoretical foundation for analyzing how social stigma and adopted behavioral traits affect the transmission of HIV across a population. We combine an evolutionary game-theoretic model-based on a relationship signaling stage game-with the SIR (susceptible-infected-recovered) model...

This paper introduces two ideas, emotional state dependent utility components (ESDUCs), and evolutionary perfect Bayesian equilibrium (EPBE). Using a simple extensive form game, we illustrate the efficiency-enhancing role of a powerful ESDUC, the vengeance motive. Incorporating behavioral noise...

In psychological games, higher-order beliefs, emotions, and motives - in addition to actions - affect players' payoffs. Suppose you are invited to a party, movie, dinner, etc not because your company is desired but because the inviter would feel guilty if she did not invite you. In all of these...

Individuals have a strong tendency to coordinate with all their neighbors on social and economics networks. Coordination is often influenced by intrinsic preferences among the available options, which drive people to associate with similar peers, i.e., homophily. Many studies reported that...