1,720,986 research outputs found
One person's trash is another person's treasure: In search of an efficient property regime for waste in the Global South
No full textPrevious literature has studied waste picking as an economic, social, and environmental phenomenon of great importance in the Global South. The legal foundations of waste picking have, however, received little scholarly attention. Surveys conducted by the global network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing show that laws about access to waste are a central concern for many waste pickers. We study the efficiency of different property regimes for waste in the Global South. The candidate regimes are exclusionary ownership of waste by one category (private companies or the waste pickers), public ownership by the state, common or communal ownership, and res nullius (“first in time, first in right”). Any property regime that tries to exclude the waste pickers from accessing waste is associated with high transaction costs. We argue that the res nullius regime, complemented by waste pickers' organizations, regulates the waste sector efficiently in the Global South
Homophily and social norms in experimental network formation games
Full text linkField studies of networks have uncovered a preference to befriend people we perceive as similar according to some dimensions of our identity (“homophily”). Lab studies of network formation games have found that adherence to social norms of reciprocity and inequity aversion are also drivers of network choices. No study so far has attempted to investigate the role of both homophily and social norms in a controlled environment. At the beginning of our experiment, each player fills in a personal profile. Each player then views the profile of all other players and expresses a degree of perceived similarity between his/her profile and the profile of the other player. At this point, a repeated network formation game ensues. We find that: (1) potential homophily considerations triggered by the profile rating task did not measurably change the players’ behavior compared to the baseline; (2) reciprocity plays a significant role in the formulation of the players’ strategies, in particular lowering the probability that the player naively best responds to the network observed in the previous period. We speculate that reciprocation of past choices might be a more “available” aid in strategy-formulation than considerations related to the similarity of the other players
Trust and trustworthiness in experimental organizations
No full textIn this paper we discuss two instruments through which corporate law attempts to promote trust and trustworthiness in business organizations: (i) monitoring of the manager by a principal, as in the agency approach; (ii) moral suasion, as in the approach according to which managers are “fiduciaries”. We present the results of a laboratory experiment designed to investigate the effectiveness of these two instruments in promoting: (i) profitable, but at the same time risky, entrustments of assets to a manager from a group of investors earning their endowment through real effort; (ii) a higher payback for those investors who entrust more assets to the manager. The first is a measure of trust of the investors in the manager, while the second is a measure of the manager’s trustworthiness. We find that moral suasion increases the investors’ trust. Monitoring also increases the investors’ trust, but only in the case in which the manager is not aware of the experimental identity of his/her principal. The manager is trustworthy up to a certain degree, regardless of the governance structure of the organization and of the accuracy with which she observes each investor’s entrustment. Finally, we find a modest positive effect of noise on trust, but no strong effect of noise on effort or trustworthiness
A social contract approach to sustainability
Full text linkThis paper asks whether it is possible to derive a concern for future generations (“sustainability”) from an account of the firm as a social contract (SC) among its stakeholders. Two aspects of a leading SC model of the firm limit its usefulness for an analysis of sustainability. First, the stakeholders provide investments to the firm over time. Second, the relationship between contemporaries and future generations is marked by asymmetries of power and knowledge that need to be considered while reconstructing the SC today. I discuss three reformulations of the SC that are all, in principle, capable of introducing within the SC a concern for future generations. The first describes the contractors as heads of families. The second envisages a grand meeting of stakeholders of all generations. The third, which I find most defensible, views the SC as an ahistorical agreement reached behind a thick veil of ignorance. This agreement is based on John Rawls’s norm of reciprocity, whereby the stakeholders adopt today the decision they wish all previous (and future) generations had made regarding the rate of consumption of natural resources and emission of pollutants.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
The Circulation of Worthless Tokens Aids Cooperation: An Experiment Inspired by the Kula
Full text linkMany anthropological records exist of seemingly worthless tokens exchanged in traditional societies. The most famous instances of such tokens are probably the Kula necklaces and armbands first described by B. Malinowski. In our experiment, each participant can send a token to another participant before each round of a repeated public good game. We use as examples of tokens a bracelet built by the participants in the lab, a simple piece of cardboard provided by the experimenter, and an object brought from home by the participants. Notwithstanding the cheap-talk nature of the decision to send the token, both sending and receiving the token are associated with a significant increase in contributions to the public good. Regression analysis shows that contributions to the public good in the treatments featuring a bracelet and a cardboard piece are higher than in a control study. The home object appears not to have been equally useful in increasing contributions
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Effetto del tipo di latte sulla capacità di adattamento dell'agnello alla tettarella artificiale.
No full textNorms and trades: An experimental investigation
No full textIn this paper we evaluate how norms of symmetry and centricity affect the functioning of two ways to allocate resources described in the economic anthropology literature, namely reciprocity and redistribution. The baseline reciprocity study, with no explicit priming of the norm of symmetry, features near-zero levels of allocative efficiency. Consistent with the anthropological framework we use throughout, we find that priming the norm of symmetry among the players through pre-play communication dramatically increases efficiency. Next we study a game of redistribution and find that in the final stages of the game allocative efficiency levels consistently approach 100%, regardless of how the chief comes to acquire centricity in the group. We conclude that reciprocity and redistribution can seldom allocate resources efficiently in the absence of norms of symmetry and centricity in the institutional design. By way of comparison, we confirm a robust finding in the experimental economics literature that a simple market exchange game reaches near-full efficiency, even when the traders can formulate expectations about each other’s compliance with norms
- …
