Herbert Gintis
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691160849
- eISBN:
- 9781400851348
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691160849.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Economic Sociology
Game theory is central to understanding human behavior and relevant to all of the behavioral sciences—from biology and economics, to anthropology and political science. However, as this book ...
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Game theory is central to understanding human behavior and relevant to all of the behavioral sciences—from biology and economics, to anthropology and political science. However, as this book demonstrates, game theory alone cannot fully explain human behavior and should instead complement other key concepts championed by the behavioral disciplines. The book shows that just as game theory without broader social theory is merely technical bravado, so social theory without game theory is a hindered enterprise. The book is a combination of a text book on game theory and a plea to use behavioral game theory as a unifying tool in all behavioral sciences. This edition has been thoroughly revised and updated. Reinvigorating game theory, the book offers innovative thinking for the behavioral sciences.Less
Game theory is central to understanding human behavior and relevant to all of the behavioral sciences—from biology and economics, to anthropology and political science. However, as this book demonstrates, game theory alone cannot fully explain human behavior and should instead complement other key concepts championed by the behavioral disciplines. The book shows that just as game theory without broader social theory is merely technical bravado, so social theory without game theory is a hindered enterprise. The book is a combination of a text book on game theory and a plea to use behavioral game theory as a unifying tool in all behavioral sciences. This edition has been thoroughly revised and updated. Reinvigorating game theory, the book offers innovative thinking for the behavioral sciences.
Viviana A. Zelizer
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691139364
- eISBN:
- 9781400836253
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691139364.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Economic Sociology
Over the past three decades, economic sociology has been revealing how culture shapes economic life even while economic facts affect social relationships. This work has transformed the field into a ...
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Over the past three decades, economic sociology has been revealing how culture shapes economic life even while economic facts affect social relationships. This work has transformed the field into a flourishing and increasingly influential discipline. This book shows how shared cultural understandings and interpersonal relations shape everyday economic activities. Far from being simple responses to narrow individual incentives and preferences, economic actions emerge, persist, and are transformed by our relations to others. Distilling three decades of research, the book offers a distinctive vision of economic activity that brings out the hidden meanings and social actions behind the supposedly impersonal worlds of production, consumption, and asset transfer. The book's scope ranges broadly from life insurance marketing, corporate ethics, household budgets, and migrant remittances to caring labor, workplace romance, baby markets, and payments for sex. These examples demonstrate an alternative approach to explaining how we manage economic activity—as well as a different way of understanding why conventional economic theory has proved incapable of predicting or responding to recent economic crises. The book provides an important perspective on the recent past and possible futures of a growing field.Less
Over the past three decades, economic sociology has been revealing how culture shapes economic life even while economic facts affect social relationships. This work has transformed the field into a flourishing and increasingly influential discipline. This book shows how shared cultural understandings and interpersonal relations shape everyday economic activities. Far from being simple responses to narrow individual incentives and preferences, economic actions emerge, persist, and are transformed by our relations to others. Distilling three decades of research, the book offers a distinctive vision of economic activity that brings out the hidden meanings and social actions behind the supposedly impersonal worlds of production, consumption, and asset transfer. The book's scope ranges broadly from life insurance marketing, corporate ethics, household budgets, and migrant remittances to caring labor, workplace romance, baby markets, and payments for sex. These examples demonstrate an alternative approach to explaining how we manage economic activity—as well as a different way of understanding why conventional economic theory has proved incapable of predicting or responding to recent economic crises. The book provides an important perspective on the recent past and possible futures of a growing field.
John F. Padgett and Walter W. Powell
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691148670
- eISBN:
- 9781400845552
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691148670.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Economic Sociology
The social sciences have sophisticated models of choice and equilibrium but little understanding of the emergence of novelty. Where do new alternatives, new organizational forms, and new types of ...
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The social sciences have sophisticated models of choice and equilibrium but little understanding of the emergence of novelty. Where do new alternatives, new organizational forms, and new types of people come from? Combining biochemical insights about the origin of life with innovative and historically oriented social network analyses, this book develops a theory about the emergence of organizational, market, and biographical novelty from the coevolution of multiple social networks. The book demonstrates that novelty arises from spillovers across intertwined networks in different domains. In the short run actors make relations, but in the long run relations make actors. This theory of novelty emerging from intersecting production and biographical flows is developed through formal deductive modeling and through a wide range of original historical case studies. The book builds on the biochemical concept of autocatalysis—the chemical definition of life—and then extends this autocatalytic reasoning to social processes of production and communication. The chapters analyze a wide range of cases of emergence. They look at the emergence of organizational novelty in early capitalism and state formation; they examine the transformation of communism; and they analyze with detailed network data contemporary science-based capitalism: the biotechnology industry, regional high-tech clusters, and the open source community.Less
The social sciences have sophisticated models of choice and equilibrium but little understanding of the emergence of novelty. Where do new alternatives, new organizational forms, and new types of people come from? Combining biochemical insights about the origin of life with innovative and historically oriented social network analyses, this book develops a theory about the emergence of organizational, market, and biographical novelty from the coevolution of multiple social networks. The book demonstrates that novelty arises from spillovers across intertwined networks in different domains. In the short run actors make relations, but in the long run relations make actors. This theory of novelty emerging from intersecting production and biographical flows is developed through formal deductive modeling and through a wide range of original historical case studies. The book builds on the biochemical concept of autocatalysis—the chemical definition of life—and then extends this autocatalytic reasoning to social processes of production and communication. The chapters analyze a wide range of cases of emergence. They look at the emergence of organizational novelty in early capitalism and state formation; they examine the transformation of communism; and they analyze with detailed network data contemporary science-based capitalism: the biotechnology industry, regional high-tech clusters, and the open source community.
Nina Bandelj, Frederick F. Wherry, and Viviana A. Zelizer (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691168685
- eISBN:
- 9781400885268
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691168685.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Economic Sociology
The world of money is being transformed as households and organizations face changing economies, and new currencies and payment systems like Bitcoin and Apple Pay gain ground. What is money, and how ...
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The world of money is being transformed as households and organizations face changing economies, and new currencies and payment systems like Bitcoin and Apple Pay gain ground. What is money, and how do we make sense of it? This is the first book to offer a wide range of alternative and unexpected explanations of how social relations, emotions, moral concerns, and institutions shape how we create, mark, and use money. The book proposes fresh explanations for money's origins, uses, effects, and future. It explores five key questions: How do social relationships, emotions, and morals shape how people account for and use their money? How do corporations infuse social meaning into their financing and investment practices? What are the historical, political, and social foundations of currencies? When does money become contested, and are there things money shouldn't buy? What is the impact of the new twenty-first-century currencies on our social relations? At a time of growing concern over financial inequality, this book overturns conventional views about money by revealing its profound social potential.Less
The world of money is being transformed as households and organizations face changing economies, and new currencies and payment systems like Bitcoin and Apple Pay gain ground. What is money, and how do we make sense of it? This is the first book to offer a wide range of alternative and unexpected explanations of how social relations, emotions, moral concerns, and institutions shape how we create, mark, and use money. The book proposes fresh explanations for money's origins, uses, effects, and future. It explores five key questions: How do social relationships, emotions, and morals shape how people account for and use their money? How do corporations infuse social meaning into their financing and investment practices? What are the historical, political, and social foundations of currencies? When does money become contested, and are there things money shouldn't buy? What is the impact of the new twenty-first-century currencies on our social relations? At a time of growing concern over financial inequality, this book overturns conventional views about money by revealing its profound social potential.
