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...

Experimental and observational studies have highlighted the importance of agents being conditionally cooperative when facing a social dilemma. We formalize this mechanism in a theoretical model that portrays a small community having joint access to a common pool resource. The diffusion of norms...

Real world observations suggest that social norms of cooperation can be effective in overcoming social dilemmas such as the joint management of a common pool resource - but also that they can be subject to slow erosion and sudden collapse. We show that these patterns of erosion and collapse...

Institutions are important for proper economic performance, but are replaceable by trust or other social norms. We show that when proper institutions and trust are missing, integrity of the individuals can replace them. We construct a model of a transactions-based economy with contracts...

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...

I present and study an evolutionary model of immigration and culturaltransmission of social norms in a set-up where agents are repeatedly matchedto play a one-shot interaction prisoner´s dilemma. Matching can be non-randomdue to limited integration (or population viscosity). The latter refers...

Institutions are important for proper economic performance, but can be somewhat replaced by trust or other social norms. This study shows that institutions and trust can be replaced by integrity of the individual agents in the economy, regardless of any social arrangement. We construct a model...

We develop an explanation of the emergence of local norms, and the associated phenom- enon of geographical variation in behavior. Individuals are assumed to interact locally with neighbors in an environment with a network externality. Although many patterns of behavior are possible, the...

Experimental and observational studies have highlighted the importance of agents being conditionally cooperative when facing a social dilemma. We formalize this mechanism in a theoretical model that portrays a small community having joint access to a common pool resource. The diffusion of norms...

Agent-based models typically involve large numbers of interacting individuals with widely differing characteristics, rules of behavior, and sources of information. The dynamics of such systems can be extremely complex due to their high dimensionality. This chapter discusses a general method for...