1,721,625 research outputs found
Why interpersonal relations matter for economics
No full textWe begins with an overview of the various connections between the economic and the relational realms. Successively, in Section 2 we utilise three established categories – namely non-rivalry, excludability and non-contractibility – for discussing whether recent trends in spontaneous sociability are really a reason for concern. In Section 3 we observe that something extraneous to established economic theory is also involved, communication at the emotional or affective level, and show that this has implications to which economics needs to give attention. In doing so we make reference to the works of authors who have ventured in these unsettled territories. These include the contributors to the book, whose chapters are briefly presented and situated in Section 4
The Emergence of Reciprocally Beneficial Cooperation
No full textThis paper offers a new and robust model of the emergence and persistence of cooperation. In the model, interactions are anonymous, the population is well-mixed, and the evolutionary process selects strategies according to material payoffs. The cooperation problem is modelled as a game similar to Prisoner’s Dilemma, but there is an outside option of nonparticipation and the payoff to mutual cooperation is stochastic; with positive probability, this payoff exceeds that from cheating against a cooperator. Under mild conditions, mutually beneficial cooperation occurs in equilibrium. This is possible because the non-participation option holds down the equilibrium frequency of cheating
Economics and Social Interaction: Accounting for Interpersonal Relations
No full textIn Chapter 2, Benedetto Gui addresses in its entirety the challenge of accounting for the communicative/affective side of face-to-face interactions, starting with a review of the various proposals that economists have advanced for doing this. Then he proposes to view such interactions as ‘encounters’, i.e., as peculiar productive processes in which agents – besides possibly exchanging ordinary goods or delivering services – create and get pleasure (or displeasure) from ‘relational consumption goods’. He stresses the fact that the inputs of these processes include ‘relational capital goods’, i.e., durable relation-specific intangible entities, which in turn accumulate (or decumulate) over successive encounters. After discussing these concepts, he provides examples of how this conceptual framework can be used for getting new insights about various phenomena ranging from migration patterns to financial markets
High Technology, Productivity and Networks. A systemic approach to SME development
No full textProgress in telecommunications and infrastructure, coupled with liberalization in international organizations, has introduced a number of new competitors to existing SMEs. This book analyzes strategic aspects of SME development that may help to promote growth: high-tech development, productivity increase, and strengthening of linkages
Alta Tencologia, producitividad y redes
No full textAnalysis of recent developments in the economic analysis of SME system
The healthy development of economies: A strategic framework for competitiveness in the health industry
No full textApplying a strategic decision-making perspective on the economics of business, we suggest that a competitive locality in the health industry is one that, relative to other localities, is effective in: (1) providing the health care that enables everyone to participate fully in the democratic development of the locality; (2) providing the health care that is democratically identified as a direct objective of this development; (3) contributing through the health industry to any other democratically determined objectives of the locality’s development. The paper hypothesises that strategic decision-making in organisations is an especially significant determinant of the impacts of the health industry. We conclude that: (i) a locality that suffers concentration in the power to determine the objectives of its health industry could not be strictly competitive in that industry; (ii) the first best way to achieve competitiveness in the health industry would be to democratise its strategic decision-making. What this would entail in practice is discussed in some detail
The willingness to pay — willingness to accept gap, the “endowment effect,” subject misconceptions, and experimental procedures for eliciting valuations : comment
No full textPlott and Zeiler (2005) report that the willingness-to-pay/willingness-to-accept disparity is absent for mugs in a particular experimental setting, designed to neutralize misconceptions about the procedures used to elicit valuations. This result has received sustained attention in the literature. However, other data from that same study, not published in that paper, exhibit a significant and persistent disparity when the same experimental procedures are applied to lotteries. We report new data confirming both results, thereby suggesting that the presence or absence of a disparity may be a more complex issue than some may have supposed. (JEL C91, D12, D81, D83
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