The Journal of socio-economics最新文献

Previous research found that the reminders about money increase social distance and solitary activity. In two studies conducted in field settings, the helping behavior of participants was observed. Passersby that just handled or not money at an automated teller machine were asked to participate in a short survey (Study 1) or have the opportunity to warn a female-confederate walking ahead of him/her that she dropped something on the ground (Study 2). In both studies, it was found that handling money several seconds earlier was associated with a decrease in helping behavior.

In a cluster and in a network the figure of the entrepreneurs appear as an apparatus of social relations and cooperation. We believe that entrepreneurial networks are key elements for a cultural quality system, but recent literature tends to not consider the social flow (internal) of spillovers produced by these (entrepreneurial) networks. The purpose of this paper is to stress the role of entrepreneurs through a conceptual map that relies upon strategic entrepreneurial networks. We suggest to fill a theoretical gap in entrepreneurial literature, and make the figure and role of entrepreneurial networking team emerge with a strategic role for creating opportunities and new social knowledge. From our interpretation appears what is still unexpressed or not well explicated in literature: the entrepreneurial team and its natural attitude in producing social knowledge.

We experimentally investigate the impact of social comparison of ability on pro-social behaviour. Randomly-selected participants were required to perform a task to earn money. Subsequently, they had to decide how much of the money to transfer to a recipient. In our baseline treatment, allocators were not informed of their relative performance (ability) ranking on the task. In another treatment, allocators were provided with such information. We found that the amount of giving to unknown recipients decreased significantly when allocators were socially aware of their relative ability. This result is robust to a variation in the format of the allocation game employed in the experiment.

Whether behavior converges toward rational play or fair play in repeated ultimatum games, depends on which player yields first. If responders conceded first by accepting low offers, proposers, would not need to learn to offer more. Play would thus converge toward unequal sharing. If proposers, learnt fast that low offers are doomed to be rejected and adjusted their offers accordingly, pressure, would be lifted from responders to learn to accept such offers. Play would thus converge toward equal, sharing. Here, we tested the hypothesis that it is regret—both material and strategic—which determines, how players adapt their behavior. We conducted a repeated ultimatum game experiment with, randomly changing strangers. One treatment offers players only feedback about the outcome of their, play. Another treatment offers additional information about the median outcomes in the population. We find that regret is a good predictor of the dynamics of play, in particular of proposer behavior., Except for a very short endgame phase, in which more tolerance of less equitable sharing surfaced, behavior converges toward equal sharing. Population information hardly speeds up this convergence.

Pre-history human economic development, it will be argued, was the result of significant increases in sociality, that itself was a product of the evolution of a human temperament associated with much more interpersonal tolerance and trust which facilitated kinship recognition and significantly expanded social network size. All this made possible in humans, an ongoing cultural evolutionary processes not seen in other animals. Though our close cousins the chimpanzees and some other animals display forms of culture, there is little evidence of significant ongoing cultural evolution in nonhuman animals. The expansion of human social networks increased the rate of cultural evolution, in part, by increasing the fixation rate of new components of culture.

In this paper we show how the investment in cultural events may encourage the building of social capital and foster the development of local communities. We rely on a case study we conducted on the socio-economic impact of “La Notte della Taranta” Festival, one of the most important European festivals dedicated to traditional music (about 170,000 participants per year), on the sub-region of southern Italy where it is held. Our evidence is based on a large survey, consisting of nearly 10,000 interviews to Festival attendees over a span of five editions (2007–2011). A primary result is that the initial economic investment in the Festival has brought a short-term return in terms of touristic attraction worth more than two times as much. More importantly, our results indicate that a cultural festival, despite being a mass gathering, is able to create strong bonds among its participants and between them and the area where the event takes place. Although these bonds are “instantaneous”, i.e. temporally restricted to the duration of the event, they are positively correlated with the economic impact of the event on the territory.

This paper tests the relationship between time preferences and crime rates as posited by Davis (1988), whose theoretical analysis suggests that individuals’ attitude towards the future significantly affects their propensity to commit crime. Our empirical analysis is based on a panel of Italian regions from 2003 to 2007. Various proxies for time preferences are considered: the consumer credit share out of the total amount of loans to households, the share of obese individuals out of the total population, the rate of marriages out of the total population, and the teenage pregnancy rate. Controlling for a great number of factors suggested by the scientific literature on the determinants of crime, adding to the model also time and regional fixed effects, and clustering standard errors to account for both serial and panel correlations, our results basically provide support to the ‘Davis’ hypothesis’ for property crimes, while for violent crimes there seems to be less evidence that these are higher where people discount the future more heavily. Moreover, there is no evidence of a reverse effect from crime to time preferences at this aggregate level.