Douglas R. White and Michael Houseman For special issue of l’Homme 2013 Regardless of now marriage is locally defined, most people in most places marry (and/or have children with) people who are neither too close (immediate family members) nor overly distant (total strangers). As a result, many members of a given community are linked to each other by multiple direct or indirect ties of consangu...

OBJECTIVES Multi-stakeholder healthcare alliances in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q) program brought together diverse stakeholders to work collaboratively to improve healthcare in their local communities. This article evaluates how well the AF4Q alliances were collectively positioned to sustain themselves as AF4Q program support ended. METHODS This anal...

Although trust has been given much attention in alliance literature as an explanatory factor, little research has been devoted to defining and operationalizing trust. Trust is more or less seen as a magic ingredient, poorly understood much like the concept of luck, and usually attributed ex post; successful alliances seem to involve trust; unsuccessful alliances do not. The extant literature ha...

Let G = (V, E) be a graph and let W:V→N be a non-negative integer weighting of the vertices in V. A nonempty set of vertices S ⊆ V is called a weighted defensive alliance if ∀v ∈ S ,∑u∈N[v]∩S w(u) ≥ ∑x∈N(v)−S w(x). A non-empty set S ⊆ V is a weighted offensive alliance if ∀v ∈ δS ,∑u∈N(v)∩S w(u) ≥ ∑x∈N[v]−S w(x). A weighted alliance which is both defensive and offensive is called a weighted pow...