Why do some individuals of sub-Saharan Africa express stronger ties to their own ethnic group than others? Using a compilation of Afrobarometer Round I surveys, I test the influence of economic conditions, good governance, and ethnic pride on individual ethnic strengths. Although my hypotheses predict that ethnic identity is politically and economically utilitarian in nature, multivariate OLS r...

The forms of explanation that dominate political science research in the formal theory and causal inference traditions are closely connected. Specifically, each makes essential use of different, but related, kinds of all-else-equal claims. The emergence of “big data” has already begun to alter the landscape of empirical social science by making new sources of information (and, thus, new phenome...

At the turn of the twenty-first century, sociologists are routinely conducting studies of phenomena that have been traditionally considered the domain of economics. And the reverse is clearly true as well. With each discipline studying the other’s topics, it is useful to get a sense of how much intellectual interchange there is and how much this has changed over time In this note, I present som...

Organizations must establish and maintain collaborative relationships in which knowledge sharing is critical to resolving numerous issues relating to data definitions and structures, diverse database designs, highly variable data quality, and incompatible network infrastructure. These integration processes often involve new work processes and significant organizational change. They are also emb...

The defining feature of agent-based models is precisely that fundamental social structures emerge from the interaction of individual agents. The shorthand for this is that the collective structures grow “from the bottom up.” As a result of research pioneered at SFI, there now exists an impressive— and rapidly growing—population of agent-based models, of coral reefs, ant colonies, bird flocks, f...

Trade misinvoicing should be seen as an element of de facto capital account openness. Traditional explanations for trade misinvoicing—high custom duties and weak domestic economies—are less persuasive in a world of high growth emerging markets that have low trade barriers. We construct a 53-country data set over a 26 year span, covering both industrialized and developing countries, to study the...

This paper is a useful integration of research that Professor Kahneman has conducted with several co-authors. The phenomena of individual decisions is a source of nagging curiosity for many sciences, applications of sciences, and philosophy. What he has to say should be of great interest to a very large research community. In discussing his paper I will narrow the perspective to economics and t...

The research described in this paper concerns alliance formation and norms of behavior in communities of intelligent agents. An alliance is composed of intelligent agents that have made a deliberate decision to join forces to achieve alliance goals. Norms are defined as limitations on agents, such as legal constraints on individual actions. The aim of this research is to arrive at descriptive a...

It is deep and important fact about human beings that extraordinary things can be achieved through concerted, coordinated action. The phenomena of coordination extends from elementary exchanges of goods or services between two persons, through a vast array of small to large scale social, commercial, industrial, military, political, public and non-governmental organizations and institutions, to ...

Financial markets crucially rely on the development of an infrastructure dedicated to the enforcement of contracts. Here we study the effects of limited enforcement capacity on financial contracting by proposing a new theory of costly state verification. In our model the principal contracts with a population of entrepreneurs, who borrow to finance risky projects under limited liability. To sust...