We investigate how and why the productivity of a worker varies as a function of the productivity of her co-workers in a group production process. In theory, the introduction of a high productivity worker could lower the effort of incumbent workers because of free riding; or it could increase the effort of incumbent workers because of peer effects induced by social norms, social pressure, or lea...

In this paper, we describe an intervention for children with social and communication deficits, such as autism, based on the use of a virtual peer that can engage in tightly collaborative narrative. We present a study in which children with autism engage in collaborative narrative with both a virtual and a human peer, and the use of contingent discourse is compared. Our findings suggest that co...

We analyze the evolution of culture when parents socialize children to the cultural variants that maximize child lifetime utility. Parents invest in cultural transmission taking into account that children are also influenced by peers. We model the influence of peers by assuming that children observe different cultural variants in their peer group, assign merit to them and adopt one variant, fol...

How to distribute resource locators is a fundamental problem in PKI. Our PKI Resource Query Protocol (PRQP), recently presented at IETF, provides a standard method to query for PKI resources locators. However the distribution of locators across PKIs is still an unsolved problem. In this paper, we propose an extension to PRQP in order to distribute PRQP messages over a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network...

In this paper we study the impact of peers on coworker learning in a retail setting. Using four years of individual cosmetic sales data from a Chinese department store, we incorporate peer-based learning into a model with learning-by-doing and forgetting. We observe peer-based learning both within and across firm boundaries, identifying that the relative ability of coworkers impacts salesperson...

The problem of finding an agreement on the meaning of heterogeneous knowledge sources is one of the key issues in the development of the distributed knowledge management applications. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for discovering semantic mappings across heterogeneous schemas. This approach shifts the problem of semantic coordination from the problem of computing linguistic or struc...

Empirical estimates of peer effects vary widely in the literature. To better understand the conflicting evidence, we develop a price theory of social interactions in which peer group membership is dictated by comparative advantage. Two key results emerge from the model. First, when comparative advantage is the guiding principle of peer group organization, the effect of transplanting a student i...