Date:

2014

By:

Hoorn, A.A.J. van (Groningen University)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:rugsom:14024-gem&r=soc

I propose and test a bottom-up channel through which trust between parties to an exchange can go on to affect comparative economic development of societies as a whole. My approach revolves around the autonomy that employers (principals) grant to workers (agents), which is a key feature of workplace organization. Analyses using measures of the cultural component of trust confirm my hypothesis that higher social trust leads countries to specialize in industries characterized by high levels of work autonomy in their production processes. My key contribution is to integrate the microeconomic literature on workplace organization with the macroeconomic literature on trust.

Date:

2014

By:

Jérôme Héricourt (CEPII - Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales - Centre d'analyse stratégique, EQUIPPE - ECONOMIE QUANTITATIVE, INTEGRATION, POLITIQUES PUBLIQUES ET ECONOMETRIE - Université Lille I - Sciences et technologies - Université Lille II - Droit et santé - Université Lille III - Sciences humaines et sociales - PRES Université Lille Nord de France)
Gilles Spielvogel (Développement et sociétés - Université Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne - Institut de recherche pour le développement [IRD] - IEDES, DIAL - Développement, institutions et analyses de long terme - Institut de recherche pour le développement [IRD])

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01065787&r=soc

This article studies the joint determination of beliefs about the economic impact of immigration and immigration policy preferences, using data from the five rounds of the European Social Survey (2002-2010). In addition to standard socio-economic characteristics, this analysis takes individual media consumption into account, as a determinant of opinion about immigration. Our results stress the important role of the endogenous determination of beliefs, which appears as a major determinant of policy preferences. Moreover, media exposure appears as a key determinant of beliefs: individuals who spend more time to get informed on social and political matters through newspapers and radio have a better opinion on the economic impact of immigration compared with individuals who devote time to other types of content.

Keywords:

international migration ; beliefs ; attitudes ; media

Date:

2014-09

By:

Max Schaub (European University Institute, Italy)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hic:wpaper:183&r=soc

This paper provides new insights into the link between the experience of violent conflict and local collective action. I use the temporal and geographical information from four rounds of survey data from Nigeria to relate measures of cooperation to past and future incidences of communal conflict. I show that local collective action, measured in terms of community meeting attendance and volunteering, is highest before the outbreak of vio-lence – higher than both post-conflict levels and the generally lower levels of cooperation in regions not affected by violence. I develop a ‘mobilisation mechanism’ to explain these findings, arguing that, rather than being an indicator of ‘social capital’, collective action ahead of communal violence is inherently ambiguous, and driven by a form of situational-ly adaptive (and potentially aggressive) ‘solidarity with an edge’. I further show that the positive link between previous exposure to civil war-type violence and cooperation holds for Nigeria, too, but that it holds for rural areas only.

Keywords:

violent conflict; collective action; Nigeria

Date:

2014-08

By:

Cabane, Charlotte
Lechner, Michael

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:usg:econwp:2014:28&r=soc

We survey the literature on the link of labour market related outcomes to individual physical activity and sports participation. The first part of the survey is devoted to the individual participation decision based and is based on papers from various disciplines. The second part summarizes parts of the epidemiological literature on health effects and the economic literature on the labour market effects as well as on the effects on well-being and social capital. Some¬what surprisingly, at least for studies in empirical economics, all the papers seem to agree that individual leisure sports participation and physical activity has positive effects for adults.

Keywords:

Physical activity, leisure time physical activity, sports participation, la¬bour market effects, unemployment, earnings

JEL:

I12 I18 J20 J30 J68 L83

Date:

2014-09

By:

Zheyin (Jane) Gu (University of Connecticut, School of Business, Marketing Department, 2100 Hillside Rd, Unit 1041, Storrs, CT, 06269.)
Yunchuan Liu (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 415 Wohlers Hall, 1206 South Sixth Street, Champaign, IL, 61820, (217) 244-2749)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:net:wpaper:1402&r=soc

We model consumer social networks as information collection media and examine two major issues: first, how consumers construct product fit signals based on product feedbacks collected from their social connections to assist with their purchase decisions, and second, how a retailer can benefit from setting up a digital platform and helping consumers collect more product feedbacks on social networks. Our analysis identifies two important structure features of consumer social networks that affect the outcome of consumer social learning: social group inter-connectivity and overall social connectivity. In particular, when the consumer social network is not well-connected, characterized by low social group inter-connectivity and low overall social connectivity, with more product feedbacks collected on social networks consumers are more likely to form informative prior beliefs about which product has a good fit. In contrast, when the consumer social network is well-connected, characterized by either high social group inter-connectivity or high overall social connectivity, more product feedbacks collected on social networks are more likely to constitute uninformative product fit signals and leave consumers uncertain about which product has a good fit. Furthermore, our analysis shows that a retailer's incentive to set up a digital platform and help consumers collect more product feedbacks on social networks depends on the supplier market structure as well as the structure of consumer social networks. In particular, a big retailer that carries horizontally differentiated products offered by competing manufacturers has incentive to facilitate consumer social learning on well-connected social networks and when without retailer assistance consumers still collect product feedbacks from a good number of social connections. The big retailer's activity of facilitating consumer social learning can also enhance total channel surplus. In contrast, a small retailer that carries product(s) offered by a single manufacturer has incentive to facilitate consumer social learning only on social networks that are not well-connected and when without retailer assistance consumers only collect a small number of social feedbacks. And the total channel efficiency suffers when the small retailer withholds from facilitating consumer social learning. Our result highlights the unique motive of big retailers to embrace the digital era when internet, mobile networks, and social media have profoundly changed consumers' shopping habits as well as the unique contribution big retailers bring in channel efficiency through their efforts of facilitating consumer social learning.

Keywords:

Consumer Social Learning, Social Networks, Retailing, Game Theory

JEL:

M31

Date:

2014-04

By:

Giovanni Vaia (Dept. of Management, Università Ca' Foscari Venice)
Anna Moretti (Dept. of Management, Università Ca' Foscari Venice)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:vnm:wpdman:777&r=soc

In an over-connected world where ICTs dominate firms' development and evolution, outsourcing is an increasingly adopted practice by IT firms facing a third-generation of inter-firm interactions: after the IT and business processes' outsourcing, and then the offshore outsourcing, now we face a sourcing ecosystem tagged as human cloud, where the online work and virtual workers are the center of the new system. Notwithstanding some relevant contributions to the literature about IT outsourcing, still few is known about how coordination between client and supplier can achieve superior outcomes through the development of collaborative practices. In particular, the use of IT tools devoted to sociality as a coordination mechanism has been under-investigated. This research provides insights about how a company can change attitudes and behaviors of client and supplier thanks to an IT tool deputed to collaboration: the social collaboration system. Through an explorative case study, our paper provides two main contributions to the literature about IT outsourcing: i) we show how the adoption of a social collaboration system improves ITO governance and performance, providing further empirical evidence on the role of social mechanisms in ITO relationships; ii) we show how the introduction of a social collaboration system in outsourcing management can influence and change the building blocks of its life-cycle.

Keywords:

IT outsourcing, governance, social collaboration, relational view, outsourcing lifecycle

JEL:

L24 M55

Date:

2014

By:

Byela Tibesigwa and Martine Visser

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rza:wpaper:456&r=soc

Even though antiretroviral treatment is becoming more efficient and available, new HIV infections still occur. This is particularly the case in sub-Saharan Africa. Sexual transmission of HIV is still the main mode of transmission in sub-Saharan Africa, and multiple sex partners have been shown to be crucial for the spread of the epidemic. It is therefore problematic that sexual risk-taking, in terms of multiple sex partners, persists in spite of HIV awareness and knowledge. This study examines the role of social norms on multiple partnerships using longitudinal data on young adults residing in the metropolitan communities of Cape Town, in South Africa. Overall, our results show that social norms, proxied by the average number of sex partners in the community, have a positive and significant influence on young adults’ choice of number of sex partners. This effect appears to be stronger amongst male young adults, than female young adults.

Keywords:

Social interaction, HIV/AIDS, Social norms, Multiple partnerships

JEL:

D1 D8 I10 I15

Date:

2014

By:

Wihbey, John P

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hrv:hksfac:12872220&r=soc

The advent of social media and peer-to-peer technologies offers the possibility of driving the full democratization of news and information, undercutting the agenda-setting of large media outlets and their relative control of news and information flows. We are now about a decade into the era of the social Web. What do the data indicate about changing news flows and access/consumption patterns in the United States? Are we witnessing a paradigm shift yet, or are legacy patterns reasserting themselves? This paper brings together media industry data and perspective—from NPR, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal—with a growing body of social science and computational research produced by universities and firms such as Microsoft Research and the Facebook data science team, as well as survey findings from the Pew Research Center. The bulk of the evidence so far complicates any easy narrative, and it very much remains an open question if we can expect a more radically democratized media ecosystem, despite promising early trends and anecdotes. As I review the evidence, I aim to highlight lessons and insights that can help those thinking about and operating in the social media space. This paper also aims to serve as an accessible survey of news media-related topics within social science and social network analysis scholarship.