3,346,775 research outputs found
Social Status and Corruption
We study the interaction between social and economic incentives in determining the level of corruption. Using social rewards as incentives for civil servants may help to reduce corruption. In our model, a decrease in corruption produces an externality that reduces the cost of hiring civil servants. In particular, it makes wage schemes which avert corruption (efficiency wages) cheaper. We show that the existence of this externality reduces the ?optimal? level of corruption in a society, the greater the power of social status, the lower the level of corruption.Fil: Galiani, Sebastian. Washington University in St. Louis; Estados UnidosFil: Weinschelbaum, Federico. Universidad de San Andrés; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin
Friendship networks and social status
In empirical studies of friendship networks participants are typically asked,
in interviews or questionnaires, to identify some or all of their close
friends, resulting in a directed network in which friendships can, and often
do, run in only one direction between a pair of individuals. Here we analyze a
large collection of such networks representing friendships among students at US
high and junior-high schools and show that the pattern of unreciprocated
friendships is far from random. In every network, without exception, we find
that there exists a ranking of participants, from low to high, such that almost
all unreciprocated friendships consist of a lower-ranked individual claiming
friendship with a higher-ranked one. We present a maximum-likelihood method for
deducing such rankings from observed network data and conjecture that the
rankings produced reflect a measure of social status. We note in particular
that reciprocated and unreciprocated friendships obey different statistics,
suggesting different formation processes, and that rankings are correlated with
other characteristics of the participants that are traditionally associated
with status, such as age and overall popularity as measured by total number of
friends.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure
Race, Economics, And Social Status
Social and economic status of an individual or group can be measured as a blend of wealth, income, occupation, and education. Other contributors to social and economic status include race, ethnicity, home ownership, family size, family types, and even types of foods purchased. The combination of social and economic status can reveal a group or individual\u27s unequal access to resources, privilege, power, and control in a society. This Spotlight on Statistics examines Consumer Expenditure Survey data to explore the patterns of social and economic factors by race and ethnicit
Social Status and Badge Design
Many websites rely on user-generated content to provide value to consumers.
These websites typically incentivize participation by awarding users badges
based on their contributions. While these badges typically have no explicit
value, they act as symbols of social status within a community. In this paper,
we consider the design of badge mechanisms for the objective of maximizing the
total contributions made to a website. Users exert costly effort to make
contributions and, in return, are awarded with badges. A badge is only valued
to the extent that it signals social status and thus badge valuations are
determined endogenously by the number of users who earn each badge. The goal of
this paper is to study the design of optimal and approximately badge mechanisms
under these status valuations. We characterize badge mechanisms by whether they
use a coarse partitioning scheme, i.e. awarding the same badge to many users,
or use a fine partitioning scheme, i.e. awarding a unique badge to most users.
We find that the optimal mechanism uses both fine partitioning and coarse
partitioning. When status valuations exhibit a decreasing marginal value
property, we prove that coarse partitioning is a necessary feature of any
approximately optimal mechanism. Conversely, when status valuations exhibit an
increasing marginal value property, we prove that fine partitioning is
necessary for approximate optimality
Social status and crime
We consider a large population of agents choosing either to engage in a criminal activity or working. Individuals feel varying degrees of selfreproach if they commit criminal acts. In addition, they are concerned with their social status in society, based on others' perceptions of their values. In making their decisions, individuals weigh both the material and social risks of being a criminal and a worker. We find that introducing social status concerns may induce multiple equilibria. We also consider the implications of intragroup and intergroup interactions in an economy with two classes of earning abilities. Typically, there is more crime in the low ability group and increasing punishment reduces crime, but the opposite may also be true.asymmetric information; behavioral economy; crime; game theory; social identity
Decoupling social status and status certainty effects on health in macaques: a network approach.
BackgroundAlthough a wealth of literature points to the importance of social factors on health, a detailed understanding of the complex interplay between social and biological systems is lacking. Social status is one aspect of social life that is made up of multiple structural (humans: income, education; animals: mating system, dominance rank) and relational components (perceived social status, dominance interactions). In a nonhuman primate model we use novel network techniques to decouple two components of social status, dominance rank (a commonly used measure of social status in animal models) and dominance certainty (the relative certainty vs. ambiguity of an individual's status), allowing for a more complex examination of how social status impacts health.MethodsBehavioral observations were conducted on three outdoor captive groups of rhesus macaques (N = 252 subjects). Subjects' general physical health (diarrhea) was assessed twice weekly, and blood was drawn once to assess biomarkers of inflammation (interleukin-6 (IL-6), tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α), and C-reactive protein (CRP)).ResultsDominance rank alone did not fully account for the complex way that social status exerted its effect on health. Instead, dominance certainty modified the impact of rank on biomarkers of inflammation. Specifically, high-ranked animals with more ambiguous status relationships had higher levels of inflammation than low-ranked animals, whereas little effect of rank was seen for animals with more certain status relationships. The impact of status on physical health was more straightforward: individuals with more ambiguous status relationships had more frequent diarrhea; there was marginal evidence that high-ranked animals had less frequent diarrhea.DiscussionSocial status has a complex and multi-faceted impact on individual health. Our work suggests an important role of uncertainty in one's social status in status-health research. This work also suggests that in order to fully explore the mechanisms for how social life influences health, more complex metrics of social systems and their dynamics are needed
Inferring Social Status and Rich Club Effects in Enterprise Communication Networks
Social status, defined as the relative rank or position that an individual
holds in a social hierarchy, is known to be among the most important motivating
forces in social behaviors. In this paper, we consider the notion of status
from the perspective of a position or title held by a person in an enterprise.
We study the intersection of social status and social networks in an
enterprise. We study whether enterprise communication logs can help reveal how
social interactions and individual status manifest themselves in social
networks. To that end, we use two enterprise datasets with three communication
channels --- voice call, short message, and email --- to demonstrate the
social-behavioral differences among individuals with different status. We have
several interesting findings and based on these findings we also develop a
model to predict social status. On the individual level, high-status
individuals are more likely to be spanned as structural holes by linking to
people in parts of the enterprise networks that are otherwise not well
connected to one another. On the community level, the principle of homophily,
social balance and clique theory generally indicate a "rich club" maintained by
high-status individuals, in the sense that this community is much more
connected, balanced and dense. Our model can predict social status of
individuals with 93% accuracy.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure
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Sex Differences in the Effect of Inflammation on Subjective Social Status: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Endotoxin in Healthy Young Adults.
It has been established that inflammation leads to a variety of changes in social experience, but one area of social experience that has been overlooked is subjective social status. Furthermore, given sex differences in the relationship between inflammation and social status, males may be more sensitive to inflammation-induced changes in social status. However, no previous studies in humans have examined this possibility. In the present study, healthy young participants (n = 115) were randomly assigned to receive either endotoxin, an experimental inflammatory challenge, or placebo. Participants reported their subjective social status at baseline (prior to injection), and approximately 2 h later (time of peak inflammatory response for the endotoxin group). Results, using ANCOVA analyses, indicated that males exposed to endotoxin, but not females, reported lower levels of subjective social status at the peak of inflammatory response (vs. placebo). These results suggest that males may be more sensitive to the effects of inflammation in certain social domains, such as perceived social status. Clinical Trial Registration: www.ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier NCT01671150
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