In this issue we feature 11 current papers on the theme of social capital:

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In this issue we have:

1. Corporate Culture, Societal Culture, and Institutions: Guiso, Luigi; Sapienza, Paola; Zingales, Luigi
2. Keeping up with the e-Joneses: Do online social networks raise social comparisons? Sabatini, Fabio; Sarracino, Francesco
3. Irrigation as a Determinant of Social Capital in India: A Large-Scale Survey Analysis: von Carnap-Bornheim, Tillmann
4. Thou shalt not steal (from hard-working people)An experiment on respect for property claims: Marco Faillo; Matteo Rizzolli; Stephan Tontrup
5. A model of belief influence in large social networks:Antonio Jiménez-Martínez
6. Overcoming Coordination Failure in a Critical Mass Game: Strategic Motives and Action Disclosure: Aidas Masiliunas
7. Fighting Corruption and the Use of Bribes in the Palestinian Territories: With or Without Social Capital: Luca Andriani
8. Redistribution through Charity and Optimal Taxation when People are Concerned with Social Status: Aronsson, Thomas; Johansson-Stenman, Olof; Wendner, Ronald
9. Cooperation, Motivation and Social Balance: Bosworth, Steven J.; Singer, Tania; Snower, Dennis J.
10. Endogenous correlated network dynamics: Rui Gong; Frank Page; Myrna Wooders
11. Risk behaviour, fraud and e-trust of individual consumers in Spain Martínez de Ibarreta, Carlos; Gijón, Covadonga

 1. Corporate Culture, Societal Culture, and Institutions

    Guiso, Luigi

    Sapienza, Paola

    Zingales, Luigi

 While both cultural and legal norms (institutions) help foster cooperation,  culture is the more primitive of the two and itself sustains formal  institutions. Cultural changes are rarer and slower than changes in legal  institutions, which makes it difficult to identify the role played by  culture. Cultural changes and their effects are easier to identify in  simpler, more controlled, environments, such as corporations. Corporate  culture, thus, is not only interesting per se, but also as a laboratory to  study the role of societal culture and the way it can be changed.

    Keywords: corporate culture; cultural economics; institutions

    JEL: K4 Z1

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:10424&r=soc

 2. Keeping up with the e-Joneses: Do online social networks raise social

     comparisons?

    Sabatini, Fabio

    Sarracino, Francesco

 Online social networks, such as Facebook, disclose an unprecedented volume of  personal information amplifying the occasions for social comparisons, which  are a source of frustration. We test the hypothesis that the use of social  networking sites (SNS) increases social comparisons as proxied by people’s  dissatisfaction with their income. After controlling for the possibility of  reverse causality, our results suggest that SNS users have a higher  probability to compare their achievements with those of others. We conclude  that SNS can be a strong engine of frustration for their users.

    Keywords: social networks; social networking sites; social comparisons;

     satisfaction with income; relative deprivation.

    JEL: D83 I31 O33 Z1 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:69201&r=soc

 3. Irrigation as a Determinant of Social Capital in India: A Large-Scale

     Survey Analysis

    von Carnap-Bornheim, Tillmann

 Practicing agriculture requires organisation and coordination. To analyse the  extent to which differences in agricultural practices can account for  variation in social capital, a large survey containing indicators of social  capital is combined with detailed agricultural statistics. The main factor  under analysis is irrigation, together with prevalent grain sorts, thereby  building on prior research. The richness of the datasets allows to explore  various dimensions of social capital in geographic detail and their  distribution among societal groups. Results reveal a significant negative  influence of irrigation on the prevalence of conflict and an increased  likelihood for communal conflict solution strategies within communities.

 These results are strongest for landholders working their own land, yet lose  significance when accounting for intra-district correlation. For other  indicators of social capital such as confidence and membership in  organisations, the results are less conclusive, yet some interesting  relations emerge.

    Keywords: Determinants of Social Capital; Agricultural Organisation;

     Irrigation; Distribution of Social Capital; Rice Theory of Culture

    JEL: N55 Q15 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:69270&r=soc

 4. GThou shalt not steal (from hard-working people)An experiment on respect

     for property claims

    Marco Faillo (University of Trento)

    Matteo Rizzolli (LUMSA University)

    Stephan Tontrup (New York University)  Abstract The institution of property is void without legal and social  enforcement against theft. To address wasteful competition over resources,  societies have long developed strategies that encompass -inter alia-  behavioral traits, social norms and legal institutions to promote the respect  and enforcement of property rights. On the other hand, a growing body of  biological and ethological evidence suggests that several other animal  species establish and respect some forms of property even in the absence of  institutions. Would human beings respect others' property in the absence of  institutions? Do people posses some innate sense of property, or do they  respect property only because of legal and social enforcement? In this study,  we explore this issue with a lab experiment that resembles a famous thought  experiment proposed by Plato. As Plato sought to understand how one ought to  behave when he or sheis completely shielded by the consequences of his  actions,we study whether people respect property once full anonymity is  granted. In this experiment, we implement a Free-Form Dictator game where  participants can both give and take up to five scratchcards from a passive  counterpart that they have either previously bought outside the lab with  their own money (legal treatments) or gained inside the lab via an effort  task (effortful treatments). In conclusion to the experiment, evidence is  provided of a (weak) sense of property. We also provide evidence that  property in the lab is better established through an effort tasks than  through the use of subject's own real property brought from outside the lab.

    Keywords: property rights, dictator game, bully game, taking, stealing,

     anonymity, effort, scratchcards

    JEL: C91 D23 K11 P14 P26

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ent:wpaper:wp58&r=soc

 5. A model of belief influence in large social networks

    Antonio Jiménez-Martínez (Division of Economics, CIDE)  This paper develops a model of evolution of beliefs through communication in  an exogenous social network. We assume that the agents are Bayesian updaters  and that the network enables them to listen to the opinion of others about  some uncertain parameter of interest. We explore the effects of the network  on the agents' long-run first-order beliefs about the parameter and  investigate the aggregation of private information in large societies. Each  agent observes private signals about the value of the unknown parameter and,  according to his connections in the network, receives private messages from  others as well. A message conveys some information about the signal observed  by the sender and about the messages that the sender receives from other  indirectly connected agents. The informativeness of a message is not  strategically chosen but it is exogenously given by the intensity of the  connection. Both signals and messages are independent and identically  distributed across time but not necessarily across agents. We first  characterize the long-run behavior of an agent's beliefs in terms of some  entropy-based measures of the conditional distributions of signals and  messages available to the agent. Then, we show that the achievement of a  consensus in the society is closely related to the presence of prominent  agents who are able to change the evolution of other agents' opinions over  time. Finally, we show that the influence of the prominent agents must not be  very high in order for the agents to aggregate correctly their private  sources of information in the long-run.

    Keywords: Communication networks, Bayesian updating, private signals,

     private messages, consensus, correct limiting beliefs

    JEL: D82 D83 D85

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:emc:wpaper:dte572&r=soc

 6. Overcoming Coordination Failure in a Critical Mass Game: Strategic Motives

     and Action Disclosure

    Aidas Masiliunas (AMSE - Aix-Marseille School of Economics - EHESS - École

     des hautes études en sciences sociales - Centre national de la recherche

     scientifique (CNRS) - Ecole Centrale Marseille (ECM) - AMU - Aix-Marseille

     Université)

 We study whether coordination failure is more often overcome if players can  easily disclose their actions. In an experiment subjects first choose their  action and then choose whether to disclose this action to other group  members, and disclosure costs are varied between treatments. We find that no  group overcomes coordination failure when action disclosure costs are high,  but half of the groups do so when the costs are low. Simulations with a  belief learning model can predict which groups will overcome coordination  failure, but only if it is assumed that players are either farsighted,  risk-seeking or pro-social. To distinguish between these explanations we  collected additional data on individual preferences and the degree of  farsightedness. We find that in the low cost treatment players classified as  more farsighted more often deviate from an inefficient convention and  disclose this action, while the effect of risk and social preferences is not  significant.

    Keywords: lock-in,coordination failure,learning,strategic

     teaching,information,collective action,critical mass

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-01273429&r=soc

 7. Fighting Corruption and the Use of Bribes in the Palestinian Territories:

     With or Without Social Capital

    Luca Andriani (Department of Management, Birkbeck College University of

     London)

 The presence of dysfunctional formal institutions in the Palestinian  Territories might drive the citizens to concentrate on alternative forms of  governance more community-oriented. Under these circumstances the set of  informal institutions embedded in the social capital of the Palestinian  community might help to explain the Palestinians attitude towards corrupt  aversion. Hence, by using a unique Palestinian survey conducted in 2007 in  West Bank and Gaza Strip, we analyse the relationship between social capital  and Palestinians attitude towards corrupt aversion. The variables of social  capital refer to voluntary activities and civic attitude while corrupt  aversion is captured by the Palestinians’ attitudes towards the use of bribes  at work and the importance of fighting corruption. A bivariate probit model  reports that corrupt aversion increases with civic attitude and is lower  among Palestinians involved in voluntary activities. Predicted conditional  probabilities suggest that under negative view of formal institutions and  lack of social trust, Palestinians need more civic attitude to cope with  corrupt aversion.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:img:manwps:8&r=soc

 8. Redistribution through Charity and Optimal Taxation when People are

     Concerned with Social Status

    Aronsson, Thomas

    Johansson-Stenman, Olof

    Wendner, Ronald

 This paper deals with tax policy responses to charitable giving based on a  model of optimal redistributive income taxation. The major contribution is  the simultaneous treatment of (i) warm-glow and stigma effects of charitable  donations; (ii) that the warm glow of giving and stigma of receiving charity  may to some extent depend on relative comparisons; and (iii) that people are  also concerned with their relative consumption more generally. Whether  charity should be taxed or supported turns out to largely depend on the  relative strengths of the warm glow of giving and the stigma of receiving  charity, respectively, and on the positional externalities caused by  charitable donations. In addition, imposing stigma on the mimicker (via a  relaxation of the self-selection constraint) strengthens the case for  subsidizing charity. We also consider a case where the government is unable  to target the charitable giving through a direct tax instrument, and examine  how the optimal marginal income tax structure is adjusted in response to  charitable giving.

    Keywords: Conspicuous consumption, conspicuous charitable giving, optimal

     income taxation, warm glow, stigma

    JEL: D03 D62 H21 H23

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:68731&r=soc

 9. Cooperation, Motivation and Social Balance

    Bosworth, Steven J. (Kiel Institute for the World Economy)

    Singer, Tania (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences)

    Snower, Dennis J. (Kiel Institute for the World Economy)  This paper examines the reflexive interplay between individual decisions and  social forces to analyze the evolution of cooperation in the presence of  "multi-directedness," whereby people's preferences depend on their  psychological motives. People have access to multiple, discrete motives.

 Different motives may be activated by different social settings.

 Inter-individual differences in dispositional types affect the responsiveness  of people's motives to their social settings. The evolution of these  dispositional types is driven by changes in the frequencies of social  settings. In this context, economic policies can influence economic decisions  not merely by modifying incentives operating through given preferences, but  also by influencing people's motives (thereby changing their preferences) and  by changing the distribution of dispositional types in the population  (thereby changing their motivational responsiveness to social settings).

    Keywords: motivation, reflexivity, cooperation, social dilemma, endogenous

     preferences, dispositions

    JEL: A13 C72 D01 D03 D62 D64

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9703&r=soc

10. Endogenous correlated network dynamics

    Rui Gong

    Frank Page

    Myrna Wooders

 We model the structure and strategy of social interactions prevailing at any  point in time as a directed network and we address the following open  question in the theory of social and economic network formation: given the  rules of network and coalition formation, preferences of individuals over  networks, strategic behavior of coalitions in forming networks, and the  trembles of nature, what network and coalitional dynamics are likely to  emerge and persist. Our main contributions are to formulate the problem of  network and coalition formation as a dynamic, stochastic game and to show that: (i) the game possesses a correlated stationary Markov equilibrium (in  network and coalition formation strategies), (ii) together with the trembles  of nature, this correlated stationary equilibrium determines an equilibrium  Markov process of network and coalition formation, and (iii) this endogenous  Markov process possesses a finite set of ergodic measures, and generates a  finite, disjoint collection of nonempty subsets of networks and coalitions,  each constituting a basin of attraction. Moreover, we extend to the setting  of endogenous Markov dynamics the notions of pairwise stability  (Jackson-Wolinsky, 1996) and the path dominance core (Page-Wooders, 2009a).

 We show that in order for any network-coalition pair to emerge and persist,  it is necessary that the pair reside in one of finitely many basins of  attraction. The results we obtain here for endogenous network dynamics and  stochastic basins of attraction are the dynamic analogs of our earlier  results on endogenous network formation and strategic basins of attraction in  static, abstract games of network formation (Page and Wooders, 2009a), and  build on the seminal contributions of Jackson and Watts (2002), Konishi and  Ray (2003), and Dutta, Ghosal, and Ray (2005).

    Keywords: endogenous network dynamics; dynamic stochastic games of network

     formation; stationary Markov correlated equilibrium; equilibrium Markov

     process of network formation; basins of attraction; Harris decomposition;

     ergodic probability measures; dynamic path dominance core; dynamic

     pairwise stability

    JEL: A14 C71 C72

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:65098&r=soc

11. Risk behaviour, fraud and e-trust of individual consumers in Spain

    Martínez de Ibarreta, Carlos

    Gijón, Covadonga

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:itse15:127162&r=soc

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