High failure rates often observed in practice suggest that collaborative relationships are still not well understood. In this paper we investigate the nature of these relationships from second-order Cybernetics and Social Systems Theory perspectives. Thereby we develop a novel theoretical framework, the Collaborative System, which explains: 1. the organizational function of collaboration; 2. th...

The school finance reforms (SFRs) that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused some of the most dramatic changes in the structure of K–12 education spending in U.S. history. We analyze the effects of these reforms on the level and distribution of school district spending, as well as their effects on subsequent educational and economic outcomes. In Part One, using a newly co...

We consider algebraic speciications with observational features. Axioms as well as observations are formulae of full (Many-Sorted) First Order Logic with Equality. The associated semantics is based on a non standard interpretation of equality called observational equality. We study the adequacy of this semantics for software speciication and the relationship with behavioural equivalence of alge...

The authors suggest that social comparison research has neglected communal feelings and concerns because it typically asks participants to compare objective characteristics that invite evaluative rankings (e.g., test scores) with acquaintances or strangers without any interaction. The authors asked 138 undergraduates to record their spontaneous social comparisons for 1 week; they found that par...

The Inequality-Growth Plateau We examine the (potentially nonlinear) relationship between inequality and growth using a method which does not require an a priori assumption on the underlying functional form. This approach reveals a plateau completely missed by commonly used (nonlinear) parametric approaches the economy first expands rapidly with a large decline in inequality, plateaus when ineq...

Andrews’ spt-function can be written as the difference between the second symmetrized crank and rank moment functions. Using the machinery of Bailey pairs a combinatorial interpretation is given for the difference between higher order symmetrized crank and rank moment functions. This implies an inequality between crank and rank moments that was only known previously for sufficiently large n and...

In this paper the effect of mimicry on social behavior and judgment in social interaction is examined. When a stranger mimics the verbal and nonverbal expressions of somebody, higher positive judgment of the mimicker is found. It was also found that various positive social behaviors such as spontaneous helping behavior, compliance to a request addressed by the mimicker... are more favorably dis...

Technological advances are leveraging the widespread deployment of mobile ad hoc networks. An interesting characteristic of ad hoc networks is their self-organization and their dependence of the behavior of individual nodes. Until recently, most research on ad hoc networks has assumed that all nodes were cooperative. This assumption is no longer valid in spontaneous networks formed by individua...

If immigration causes a decrease in social cohesion, then it may also be an important contributing factor in the recent failure of financial institutions. The present analysis finds some evidence for a negative relationship between immigration and volunteering from the Current Population Survey 2004–2008 September Supplements. Various specifications confirm the tendency of immigrant inflows to ...

Current evolutionary and cognitive theories of religion posit that supernatural agent concepts emerge from cognitive systems such as theory of mind and social cognition. Some argue that these concepts evolved to maintain social order by minimizing antisocial behavior. If these theories are correct, then people should process information about supernatural agents' socially strategic knowledge mo...