9,184 research outputs found

    The evolution of leader-follower reciprocity: The theory of service-for-prestige

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    Copyright © 2014 Price and Van Vugt. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.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, they ultimately evolved into exchange relationships whereby followers could compensate leaders for services which would otherwise have been prohibitively costly for leaders to provide. In this exchange, leaders incur costs to provide followers with public goods, and in return, followers incur costs to provide leaders with prestige (and associated fitness benefits). Because whole groups of followers tend to gain from leader-provided public goods, and because prestige is costly for followers to produce, the provisioning of prestige to leaders requires solutions to the “free rider” problem of disrespectful followers (who benefit from leader services without sharing the costs of producing prestige). Thus service-for-prestige makes the unique prediction that disrespectful followers of beneficial leaders will be targeted by other followers for punitive sentiment and/or social exclusion. Leader–follower relations should be more reciprocal and mutually beneficial when leaders and followers have more equal social bargaining power. However, as leaders gain more relative power, and their high status becomes less dependent on their willingness to pay the costs of benefitting followers, service-for-prestige predicts that leader–follower relations will become based more on leaders’ ability to dominate and exploit rather than benefit followers. We review evidential support for a set of predictions made by service-for-prestige, and discuss how service-for-prestige relates to social neuroscience research on leadership

    Re-shaped by mobile technologies' disruption: the videogame industry in Turkey

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    In this study, we investigate the business disruption effects of mobile technologies for the videogame industry in Turkey. Previous research shows that before mobile gaming became prevalent globally, the Turkish videogame industry was extremely small and lacked any success stories for either console or PC platforms. The rise in mobile and the so-called “casual” gaming gave the local industry a competitive advantage on a global scale. To capture the nuances of this disruptive transition, we performed structured interviews with gaming industry experts and analyzed prominent discussion forums for primary and secondary data collections, respectively. We especially focused on answering the following questions: (1) how prepared were Turkish videogame development companies in handling the mobile disruptive change; (2) what kind of transformations they experienced in their business plans and practices as a result; (3) how the disruption affected the way they viewed their customer base; and finally (4) what future disruptions they expect in their industry

    Network models of innovation and knowledge diffusion

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    Much of modern micro-economics is built from the starting point of the perfectly competitive market. In this model there are an infinite number of agents — buyers and sellers, none of whom has the power to influence the price by his actions. The good is well-defined, indeed it is perfectly standardized. And any interactions agents have is mediated by the market. That is, all transactions are anonymous, in the sense that the identities of buyer and seller are unimportant. Effectively, the seller sells “to the market” and the buyer buys “from the market”. This follows from the standardization of the good, and the fact that the market imposes a very strong discipline on prices. Implicit here is one (or both) of two assumptions. Either all agents are identical in every relevant respect, apart, possibly, from the prices they ask or offer; or every agent knows every relevant detail about every other agent. If the former, then obviously my only concern as a buyer is the prices asked by the population of sellers since in every other way they are identical. If the latter, then each seller has a unique good, and again what I am concerned with is the price of it. In either case, we see that prices capture all relevant information and are enough for every agent to make all the decisions he needs to make....economics of technology ;

    Re-shaped by Mobile Technologies\u27 Disruption: The Videogame Industry in Turkey

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    In this study, we investigate the business disruption effects of mobile technologies for the videogame industry in Turkey. Previous research shows that before mobile gaming became prevalent globally, the Turkish videogame industry was extremely small and lacked any success stories for either console or PC platforms. The rise in mobile and the so-called “casual” gaming gave the local industry a competitive advantage on a global scale. To capture the nuances of this disruptive transition, we performed structured interviews with gaming industry experts and analyzed prominent discussion forums for primary and secondary data collections, respectively. We especially focused on answering the following questions: (1) how prepared were Turkish videogame development companies in handling the mobile disruptive change; (2) what kind of transformations they experienced in their business plans and practices as a result; (3) how the disruption affected the way they viewed their customer base; and finally (4) what future disruptions they expect in their industry

    Mass Atrocities and their Prevention

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    Counting conservatively, and ignoring physical injuries and mental trauma, data show about 100 million mass atrocity-related deaths since 1900. Occurring in war and in peacetime, and of enormous scale, severity, and brutality, they are geographically widespread, occur with surprising frequency, and can be long-lasting in their adverse effects on economic and human development, wellbeing, and wealth. As such, they are a major economic concern. This article synthesizes very diverse and widely dispersed theoretical and empirical literatures, addressing two gaps: a “mass atrocities gap” in the economics literature and an “economics gap” in mass atrocities scholarship. Our goals are, first, for noneconomists to learn how economic inquiry contributes to understanding the causes and conduct of mass atrocities and possibly to their mitigation and prevention and, second, to survey and synthesize for economists a broad sweep of literatures to serve as a common platform on which to base further work in this field

    Computational rationality and voluntary provision of public goods: an agent-based simulation model

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    The issue of the cooperation among private agents in realising collective goods has always raised problems concerning the basic nature of individual behaviour as well as the more traditional economic problems. The Computational Economics literature on public goods provision can be useful to study the possibility of cooperation under alternative sets of assumptions concerning the nature of individual rationality and the kind of interactions between individuals. In this work I will use an agent-based simulation model to study the evolution of cooperation among private agents taking part in a collective project: a high number of agents, characterised by computational rationality, defined as the capacity to calculate and evaluate their own immediate payoffs perfectly and without errors, interact to producing a public good. The results show that when the agents’ behaviour is not influenced either by expectations of others’ behaviour or by social and relational characteristics, they opt to contribute to the public good to an almost socially optimal extent, even where there is no big difference between the rates of return on the private and the public investment.Computational Economics; Agent-based models; Social Dilemmas; Collective Action; Public Goods

    Social Dynamics

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    What theories are there of social dynamics, of the emergence, adaptation, resilience, collapse or decay, of social systems such as organisations, communities, networks, cliques and teams? In chapter 1, I consider evolutionary theory, in biology, economics, sociology and psychology. In chapter 2 I consult the literature on Complex Adaptive Systems, and its applicability to social systems. Social systems are distinctive, in being intentional and reflexive, with intentions depending on outcomes. In chapter 3 I focus on social systems: their variety, the role of language, the relation between self and other, network effects, and their collapse, resilience and rigidity

    Human Ecology Economics (HEE) and Strategic Management

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    Human Ecology Economics (HEE) draws on evolutionary and complex systems processes by incorporating interdisciplinary material from the humanities and sciences. Lessons for strategic managers follow from this HEE perspective with examples from the banking industry. HEE can nurture a broad environmental perspective among strategic managers and an ontological understanding of their organization within its dynamic ecology. Reconciliation is attempted between the chaotic dualities inherent in strategic management (SM)

    Meta-Communication and Market Dynamics. Reflexive Interactions of Financial Markets and the Mass Media

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    A widely held belief in financial economics suggests that stock prices always adequately reflect all available information. Price movements away from fundamentals are assumed to occur only infrequently, if at all. „False“ prices are supposed to be corrected by the counter-actions of „rational“ investors reestablishing equilibrium. However, empirical evidence of widespread irrationality among investors as well as theoretical insights into the properties of complex systems suggest that this view is too static. In fact, it can be shown that under certain conditions dynamic disequilibria have a considerable probability of being „locked in“. The mass media play no mean role in this: By conditioning trend-following behavior and fostering coordination among large numbers of investors, the media can help bring about such destabilizing moves. Media attention can induce positive feedback by increasing the level of excess noise in the market while decreasing the number of perceived behavioral options. Meta-communication thus generated is a prime source of instability in financial markets.
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