Tipping is a significant economic activity (tips in the US food industry alone amount to about $42 billion annually) that was claimed to improve service quality and increase economic efficiency, because it gives incentives to provide excellent service, and therefore allows to avoid costly...

The human mind is not a general problem solving machine. Instead of deliberately, consciously and serially processing the available information, men can rely on routines, rules, roles or affect for the purpose. They can bring in technology, experts or groups. For all of these reasons, men have a...

Tipping is a multi-billion-dollar phenomenon that standard economic models find hard to explain. I discuss several aspects of tipping and divide tipping to six different categories: reward-tipping, price-tipping, tipping-in-advance, bribery-tipping, holiday-tipping and gift-tipping, and discuss...

This paper analyzes the importance of social ties for eating behavior of US youth. We propose a novel approach that addresses identification of social endogenous effects. We overcome the problem of measuring the separate impact of endogenous and contextual effects on individual Body Mass Index...

Tipping is a multi-billion-dollar phenomenon that challenges the traditional assumption of selfish economic agents who have no feelings and do not care about social norms. This paper reviews the early history of tipping and offers an economic analysis of different aspects of tipping. Using the...

Tipping is a significant economic activity (tips in the US food industry alone amount to about $42 billion annually) that was claimed to improve service quality and increase economic efficiency, because it gives incentives to provide excellent service, and therefore allows to avoid costly...

This paper is a critical introduction to the new wave of economic literature on the effect of social interactions on individual behavior and aggregate economic outcomes. I refer to this research program, also known as new social economics, as the socioeconomic analysis of behavior, to...

The human mind is not a general problem solving machine. Instead of deliberately, consciously and serially processing the available information, men can rely on routines, rules, roles or affect for the purpose. They can bring in technology, experts or groups. For all of these reasons, men have a...

[paper in French] This paper analyses the meanings, trajectory and perception of nutritional recommendations concerning weight control and dieting, through 85 semi-directive interviews. The article underlines three oppositions concerning the meanings of “diet”: firstly, dieting is closely...

This paper presents an overlapping generations model to explain why humans live in families rather than in other pair groupings. Since most non-human species are not familial, something special must be behind the family. It is shown that the two necessary features that explain the origin of the...