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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.

Under the New Jersey State Constitution as interpreted by the State Supreme Court in 1975 and 1983, municipalities are required to use their zoning authority to create realistic opportunities for a fair share of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income households. Mount Laurel was the town at the center of the court decisions. As a result, Mount Laurel has become synonymous with the debate over affordable housing policy designed to create economically integrated communities. What was the impact of the Mount Laurel decision on those most affected by it? What does the case tell us about economic inequality? This book undertakes a systematic evaluation of the Ethel Lawrence Homes—a housing development produced as a result of the Mount Laurel decision. The book assesses the consequences for the surrounding neighborhoods and their inhabitants, the township of Mount Laurel, and the residents of the Ethel Lawrence Homes. Their analysis reveals what social scientists call neighborhood effects—the notion that neighborhoods can shape the life trajectories of their inhabitants. The book proves that the building of affordable housing projects is an efficacious, cost-effective approach to integration and improving the lives of the poor, with reasonable cost and no drawbacks for the community at large.

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.

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.

This book looks at local drug manufacturing in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, from the early 1980s to the present, to understand the impact of foreign aid on industrial development. While foreign aid has been attacked by critics as wasteful, counterproductive, or exploitative, this book makes a clear case for the effectiveness of what it terms “developmental foreign aid.” Against the backdrop of Africa’s pursuit of economic self-sufficiency, the battle against AIDS and malaria, and bitter negotiations over affordable drugs, the book offers an important corrective to popular views on foreign aid and development. It shows that when foreign aid has provided markets, monitoring, and mentoring, it has supported the emergence and upgrading of local production. In instances where donors were willing to procure local drugs, they created new markets that gave local entrepreneurs an incentive to produce new types of drugs. In turn, when donors enforced exacting standards as a condition to access those markets, they gave these producers an incentive to improve quality standards. And where technical know-how was not readily available and donors provided mentoring, local producers received the guidance necessary for improving production processes. Without losing sight of domestic political-economic conditions, historical legacies, and foreign aid’s own internal contradictions, the book presents new insights into the conditions under which foreign aid can be effective.

Millions of workers today labor in nontraditional situations involving part-time work, temporary agency employment, and skills underutilization or face the precariousness of long-term unemployment. To date, research has largely focused on how these experiences shape workers' well-being, rather than how hiring agents perceive and treat job applicants who have moved through these positions. Shifting the focus from workers to hiring agents, this book explores how key gatekeepers evaluate workers with nonstandard, mismatched, or precarious employment experience. Factoring in the social groups to which workers belong—such as their race and gender—the book shows how workers get jobs, how the hiring process unfolds, who makes the cut, and who does not. The book documents and unpacks three important discoveries. Hiring professionals extract distinct meanings from different types of employment experiences; the effects of nonstandard, mismatched, and precarious employment histories for workers' job outcomes are not all the same; and the race and gender of workers intersect with their employment histories to shape which workers get called back for jobs. Indeed, hiring professionals use group-based stereotypes to weave divergent narratives or “stratified stories” about workers with similar employment experiences. The result is a complex set of inequalities in the labor market. Looking at bias and discrimination, social exclusion in the workplace, and the changing nature of work, the book probes the hiring process and offers a clearer picture of the underpinnings of getting a job in the new economy.

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.