Social capital has recently emerged as an important interdisciplinary research area. It is frequently used as a framework for understanding various social issues in temporal communities, neighbourhoods and groups. In particular, researchers in the social sciences and the humanities have used social capital to understand trust, shared understanding, reciprocal relationships, social network struc...

Individualistic cultures that prevail in predominantly developed economies thrive on ecommerce environments where consumer trust is facilitated through trust mechanisms such as institutional guarantees, laws and policies, information security mechanisms, and social controls. These trust mechanisms are based on individualist cultural norms of behaviour and values, and are not always relevant to ...

Trust and reciprocity have been recognized as a means of reducing transaction cost and achieving mutually beneficial outcomes when legal contracts and third-party enforcement are absent or too costly. Some economic activities require trust and reciprocity among agents who are not familiar with each other and only have economic interactions at randomly determined times. One example is e-commerce...

This paper presents the influence of norms on agent trust and autonomy. Different attributes of norms were considered that accentuate trust and attenuate autonomy. Experimental results illustrate changes in trust and autonomy with different patterns of norm adherence. We also define stability as a result of predictable agent behavior and present related experiments.

1. Introduction Broadly understood, social capital refers to various types of community relationships that affect individual outcomes. As such, social capital is involved in many of the areas of current social science research where the explicitly social determinants of behavior are fundamental. Since Loury (1977) introduced it into modern social science research and Coleman's (1988) seminal st...

This paper presents an agent-based model of the networkbased trust game by combing two essential ingredients, namely new economic geography and cooperative games. Through simulating this model, we would like to show the coevolution of trusts, networks, economic growth and income distribution. Variations of the proposed design allow us to examine the role of social trust in economic growth and c...

Robert Putnam defines social capital as “features of social organization, such as networks, norms and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation” (Putnam 1995: 67). Such networks are typically associated with norms that promote coordination, cooperation and reciprocity for the mutual benefit of network members. These norms, coupled with the appropriate use of sanctions in case of...

Cognitive social capital (e.g., norms/values, trust, reciprocity), is expected to contribute to project success. However, the manner in which this occurs has not received much attention. Using data from Ghana we provide findings on the contributions of cognitive social capital to project success by way of knowledge acquisition and exploitation.