The propensity to imitation over other forms of learning is one of the major differences between humans and other species and one that has allowed for cumulative cultural evolution. However, imitation alone cannot explain increases of average fitness in human populations. Anthropologists have hypothesized that people do not imitate behaviors from random people; rather, transmission of some cult...

We describe the service-for-prestige theory of leadership, which proposes that voluntary leader-follower relations evolved in humans via a process of reciprocal exchange that generated adaptive benefits for both leaders and followers. We propose that although leader-follower relations first emerged in the human lineage to solve problems related to information sharing and social coordination, th...

The status of a journal is commonly determined by two factors: popularity and prestige. While the former counts citations, the latter recursively weights them with the prestige of the citing journals. We make a thorough comparison of the bibliometric concepts of popularity and prestige for journals in the sciences and in the social sciences. We find that the two notions diverge more for the har...

Sociologists and organizational theorists have long claimed that the processes of knowledge creation and distribution are fundamentally social. Following in this tradition, we explore the effect of institutional prestige on university technology licensing. Empirically, we examine the influence of university prestige on the annual rate of technology licensing by 102 universities from 1991 to 199...

We describe two theoretical explanations for the amount, pace, and costs of the prestige enhancement a firm engages in during the year before its initial public offering. The “snowball model” captures well-known processes whereby prestige-rich organizations accumulate even more prestige. The “dressing-up model” builds upon deadline-induced remediation, a phenomenon not previously studied in a m...

ABOUT THIS POLICY: Prestige Health Choice has developed clinical policies to assist with making coverage determinations. Prestige Health Choice’s clinical policies are based on guidelines from established industry sources, such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), state regulatory agencies, the American Medical Association (AMA), medical specialty professional societies, and p...

ABOUT THIS POLICY: Prestige Health Choice has developed clinical policies to assist with making coverage determinations. Prestige Health Choice’s clinical policies are based on guidelines from established industry sources, such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), state regulatory agencies, the American Medical Association (AMA), medical specialty professional societies, and p...