What can studying the creation of knowledge tell us about how new technical fields emerge and develop? This paper shows how a knowledge community may be necessary to support the legitimacy of new products that undergo performance evaluation before purchase. Using historical and ethnographic data...

Empirical evidence suggests that networks of personal relations are important in the micro dynamics of labor markets: even in modern capitalistic economies a high share of jobs are filled by social referrals. This paper aims at shedding light on an apparent puzzle concerning the relationship...

This paper presents an heuristics of economic action in South Korea which is based on a qualitative study conducted on-site. It focuses on the idea of experience-near concepts - as introduced by Clifford Geertz - and is verbalised by the terms affiliation, indebtedness and mediation. The...

The aim of this paper is to provide a new mechanism based on social interactions explaining why distance to jobs can have a negative impact on workers' labor-market outcomes, especially ethnic minorities. Building on Granovetter's idea that weak ties are superior to strong ties for providing...

A game-theoretic model for the description of political parties' competition in Ukraine is constructed. The system of assumptions, which is formed the basis of the model, is obtained. The electoral situations in Ukraine, as examples, are described by utilizing the proposed model. A set of...

This article establishes that there are significant social influences on the decisions made by individuals about whether to trust others. These social interactions effects may arise from exogenous-environmental characteristics or from endogenous effects that make people conform to the particular...

It is impossible, in general, to extend an asymmetric two-player game to networks, because there must be two populations, the row one and the column one, but we do not know how to define inner-population interactions. This is not the case for Matching Pennies, as we can interpret the row player...

Since 1950s, most African nations have gained independence from their colonial powers. Fortunately, independence has brought many changes to these nations and these include multi-party democratic government and western education systems. Unfortunately, the Africa's economy is the least developed...

We survey the literature on social networks by putting together the economics, sociological and physics/applied mathematics approaches, showing their similarities and differences. We expose, in particular, the two main ways of modeling network formation. While the physics/applied mathematics...

Since the end of the American Civil War, scholars have debated the efficacy of various models of community economic development, or CED. Historically, this debate has tracked one of two approaches: place-based models of CED, seeking to stimulate community development through market-driven...