Social capital and cooperation
Essential readings
Costa, D., Kahn, M. (2003). Cowards and Heroes: Group Loyalty in the American Civil War. Quarterly Journal of Economics. 118 (2): 519-548
What motivated men to risk death in the most horrific war in U.S. history when pay was low and...
Frey, B. S., Meier, S. (2004). Social Comparisons and Pro-social Behavior: Testing "Conditional Cooperation" in a Field Experiment. The American Economic Review 94 (5), 1717-1722
Many important activities, such as charitable giving, voting, and paying taxes, are difficult to...
Bénabou, R. J. M., Tirole, J. (2006). Incentives and Prosocial Behavior. American Economic Review 96 (5), 1652-1678
We develop a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and...
Important readings
Greif, A., Tabellini, G. (2012). The Clan and the City: Sustaining Cooperation in China and Europe
Over the last millennium, the clan and the city have been the locus of cooperation in China and...
Reading list archive
Bénabou, R., Tirole, J. (2009). Over My Dead Body: Bargaining and the Price of Dignity. American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings 99:2, 459–465
Concerns of pride, dignity, and the desire to “keep hope” about future options often...
Benabou, R., Tirole, J. (2011). Identity, Morals and Taboos: Beliefs as Assets. Quarterly Journal of Economics, in press.
We develop a theory of moral behavior, individual and collective, based on a general model of...
Bowles, S., Carpenter, J., Gintis, H., Ha-Hwang, S. (2009). Strong reciprocity and team production: Theory and evidence. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 71 (2), 221-232
Punishment of shirkers is often an effective means of attenuating incentive problems and sustaining...
Bowles, S., Gintis, H. (2004). The Evolution of Strong Reciprocity: Cooperation in Heterogeneous Populations. Theoretical Population Biology 65, 17-28
How do human groups maintain a high level of cooperation despite a low level of genetic relatedness...
Burchardi, K., Hassan, T. (2011). The Economic Impact of Social Ties: Evidence from German Reunification. CEPR Discussion Paper DP8470
We use the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to identify a causal effect of social ties on regional...
Carnevali, F. (2010). Social capital and trade associations in America, c. 1860–1914: a microhistory approach. Economic History Review, 64 (3), 905–928
This microhistory explores the activities of one of the many trade associations created in the...
Charness, G., Rustichini, A. (2010). Gender differences in cooperation with group membership
We study experimentally how males and females differ in the way same-gender peers observing their...
Declerck C., Boone, C., Emonds, G. (2011). When do people cooperate? The neuroeconomics of prosocial decision making. University of Antwerp, Faculty of Applied Economics Working Paper 2011009
Understanding the roots of prosocial behavior is an interdisciplinary research endeavor that has...
Ermisch, J., Gambetta, D. (2011). Do strong family ties inhibit trust? Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 75: 365–376.
We provide direct evidence that people with strong family ties have a lower level of trust in...
Fershtman, C., Gandal, N. (2011). A Brief Survey of the Economics of Open Source Software. In Blume, L., Durlauf, S. (Eds), The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics
The open source model is a form of software development in which the source code is made available...
Frey, B. S., Meier, S. (2004). Pro-social behavior in a natural setting. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 54, 65–88
Empirical evidence is provided for the importance of pro-social behavior of individuals in an...
Frey, B., Savage, D. A., Trogler, B. (2010). Noblesse oblige? Determinants of survival in a life-and-death situation. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 74, 1–11
This paper explores what determines the survival of people in a life-and-death situation. The...
Frey, B., Savage, D. A., Trogler, B. (2011). Behavior under Extreme Conditions: The Titanic Disaster. Journal of Economic Perspectives 24 (4), 1–14
For social scientists, evidence about how people behaved as the Titanic sunk offers a quasi-natural...
