Context effects, where a characteristic of an upper-level unit or cluster (e.g., a country) affects outcomes and relationships at a lower level (e.g., that of the individual), are a primary object of sociological inquiry. In recent years, sociologists have increasingly analyzed such effects...

We examine cooperative behavior when large sums of money are at stake, using data from the television game show <i>Golden Balls</i>. At the end of each episode, contestants play a variant on the classic prisoner's dilemma for large and widely ranging stakes averaging over $20,000. Cooperation is...

The rise of multi-level modeling in social sciences brings new challenges. Multi-level modeling, although used in a great variety of ways, aims at simultaneously assessing the impact of individual-level and context-level characteristics on a dependent variable that is measured at the individual...

There is a broad consensus that the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur is not only influenced by individual characteristics but also by spatial context conditions. However, context factors are not per se stable; they tend to vary over time which is particularly relevant during economic...

This paper uses the data gained from an income categorization experiment for five shapes of income distributions to investigate background context effects, relative deprivation, range-frequency theory to explain back- ground context effects, individual income satisfaction versus aggregate well-...