Different from a classic Weberian bureaucracy, public service bureaucrats directly interact with citizens at the frontlines of government. These first responders use their discretion to meet some citizens’ needs but deliberately overlook the other clients. What lies beneath the street-level bureaucrats’ behavior in their contacts with citizens? This study develops a model to explain how street-level

Whilst the properties of decision regret have been widely explored in experimental and game theoretic studies, the empirical features of regret from large-scale ‘binary decision’ national events in practice have garnered less scrutiny. This study is an empirical investigation of novel survey data reporting ‘Brexit’ voting choices and expressions of a desire to change voting choices post-referendum

Using social exchange theory, this article presents a new theory for understanding the strategic choices made by social movement leaders—the “movement exchanges” theory. It looks at how leaders engage in exchanges of valued rewards with constituencies, institutional political players, bystander publics, and voluntary organizations. Leaders receive from these players important rewards (like committed

Rationality and Society was founded by editor James S Coleman in 1989. Today, 32 years later, the rational action paradigm continues to be an intellectual point of reference appealing to social scientists who strive for theoretically consistent, analytically precise, empirically refutable, and practically useful theories of social phenomena. When Douglas D Heckathorn became the journal’s editor in

Informal reasoning fallacies belong to a persuasive tactic, leading to a conclusion that is not supported by premises but reached through emotions and/or misleading and incomplete information. Previous research focused on the ability to recognize informal reasoning fallacies. However, the recognition itself does not necessarily mean immunity to their influence on decisions made. An experiment was designed

Armed conflict in Colombia with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP) was only settled after fifty years and several attempts at negotiations. This sequence of events fits the pattern of “conflict ripeness” first proposed by William Zartman. But using a successful settlement as a way to determine ripeness can be tautological. To address this issue, we develop a formal model to identify

Income redistribution with an efficiency loss is expected to have a twofold negative effect on support for redistribution, as it lowers egoistic support for redistribution and activates efficiency preferences. This study tests whether such a negative relationship exists, increases with the size of efficiency loss and interacts with group communication and the income position. We present a laboratory

Read, Daniel (2020) The Five Games of Mr Edgar Allan Poe: A study of strategic thought in “The Purloined Letter” Rationality and Society 32(4): 369–401.

Particularly in the social sciences, scientific debates can be understood as a special expression of academic discourse and ideally support the progress of knowledge within a discipline. Very often, there are competing academic schools with greatly differing theoretical foundations, like we have seen, for example, in social sciences especially by the “Methodenstreit” in economics, or the “Positivismusstreit”

People commonly possess multiple, differentially-valued resources they can use to benefit those in need: contributing money, volunteering time, donating unwanted possessions, posting on social media to raise awareness, and more. But the majority of experimental work on generosity and helping behavior has studied giving when only a single valuable resource is available to give. This project considers:

This article proposes a general model of partisan political dealignment based on the theory of expressive voting. It is based on the Riker and Odershook equation. Voters cast a ballot for a political party if the utility associated with expressing their support for it is more than their expressive costs. Expressive utility is modeled here as a certain utility model. Then, the model is applied to the

This work examines the validity of the two main assumptions of relative risk-aversion models of educational inequality. We compare the Breen-Goldthorpe (BG) and the Breen-Yaish (BY) models in terms of their assumptions about status maintenance motives and beliefs about the occupational risks associated with educational decisions. Concerning the first assumption, our contribution is threefold. First

While death-related household overspending is increasingly an international phenomenon with far-reaching implications, the government responses to it vary greatly throughout the world. This article offers a model of death-related overspending, including both population and governments. The analysis of data from 118 countries empirically supports the main research argument—the decline of traditional

Escalation is a key characteristic of many consumption behaviors that has not received theoretical attention. This paper aims to propose both a definition and a theoretical treatment of escalation in consumption. We define escalation as a subject’s attempt to obtain “more” or engage in consumption behaviors that are “more intense” on a measurable, quantitative or qualitative, objective or subjective

Governance rules are efficient mechanisms in the sense that they increase people’s welfare. They emerge even when the state is unable or refuses to create and enforce them. We study a situation in which this demand for governance manifests itself through the emergence of property rights in illicit drug markets: a privately-provided governance. Specifically, we propose a model for property rights emergence

On-side fighting – outright violence between armed groups aligned on the same side of a civil war’s master cleavage – represents a devastating breakdown in cooperation. Its humanitarian consequences are also grave. But it has been under-recognized empirically and therefore under-theorized by scholars to date. This article remedies the omission. Existing research can be extrapolated to produce candidate

In both the United States of America and the European Union, Member States are encouraged to prevent young people from starting to smoke by forbidding selling tobacco products to people under a cer...

We consider a principal-agent model with moral-hazard and asymmetric awareness and show how the heterogeneity of agents on their aversion to effort affects contract design. We discuss the optimal contract adopted when a principal is aware of all the impacts of an agent’s action, while agents ignore some of them. When a principal faces two types of agents, where one type is more effort-averse than the

Is the act of making a decision a process or pulse? Critiques of rational choice theory and models often treat cognitive processes of preference ordering as part of the act of decision that should be incorporated into the models. The failure to account for human psychology, they argue, responds for RCT’s lack of predictability. However, this argument and the models of human mind, such as prospect theory

This paper investigates strategic thinking in the fictional world of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’. This short story has been rightly celebrated for its explicit analysis of strategic reasoning in which players attempt to outwit one another, which involves accounting for how they are all attempting to outwit one another. I differ from previous analyses by examining how the actors can often

This article proposes a decision model of the British support for leaving the European Union (EU) that includes both identity aspirations, attitudes towards the political system and economic interest and test it on the Understanding Society 6th, 7th and 8th surveys. Current studies tend to interpret the British Euroscepticism as a combination of attachment to British identity, lack of economic opportunities

This study explores the nuances of South Koreans’ approval for nudge policies by replicating a survey conducted in global nudge research, and then extending the analysis and discussion with greater detail about the context. The traditions, culture, and development of Korea have contributed to a distinct behavioral bias profile that must be integrated into approaches for nudge policy design and implementation

How a social norm emerges has been studied extensively. However, how a norm collapses has rarely been addressed in the literature. In this article, extending the theories of norm emergence by Coleman and Axelrod, I propose a theory of norm collapse. This theory specifies one micro mechanism and macro–micro–macro process through which a norm likely decays and eventually collapses. Then, as a test, I

We study the existence of homophily (i.e. the tendency for people to be friends with people who are similar to themselves) with respect to trustworthiness. We ask whether two friends show similarly trustworthy behavior toward strangers, and whether such behavior is expected by a third party. We develop a simple model of Bayesian learning in trust games and test the derived hypotheses in a controlled

This article considers how desire leads to pleasure through choice. A typical assumption of rational choice models is that decision makers experience pleasure or utility primarily when their desires are satisfied by decision outcomes. This article proposes that, in addition to desire yielding pleasure through its satisfaction, desiring can also yield pleasure directly during choice. Beyond the pleasures

In recent decades, there has been increased tolerance within many countries towards a range of previous out-groups. This has been displayed most dramatically in the growing acceptance of the LGBT community. Some radical right organisations are also expressing tolerance towards the very same out-groups which they once reviled. We postulate that the radical right strategically uses tolerance to increase

Social hierarchies exist in democracies as well as in authoritarian societies. However, their nature is different. Democratic hierarchies are built bottom-up through election while autocratic hierarchies are built top-down through domination. Both, however, have power asymmetries between the weaker citizens and the stronger politicians, which are amplified the stronger the hierarchies are. This manuscript

This article measures discrimination in the reality TV show Big Brother, a high-stakes environment. Data on contestants’ nominations are taken from 35 series of the British version of the show, covering the years 2000–2016. Race and age discrimination are found, with contestants more likely to nominate those of a different race and those different in age from themselves. However, no discrimination

Scholarly consensus that social ties resolve social dilemmas is largely predicated on common knowledge of networks. But what happens when people do not know all relevant social ties? Does network uncertainty translate into worse outcomes? I address these concerns by advancing the notion of a Network Estimation Bayesian Equilibrium to examine cooperative behavior under different epistemic conditions

The study investigates the effect of embeddedness, defined as a property of interdependent relations in which organizations are integrated in a network, on collaboration risk emerging from relational uncertainty. Despite efforts to understand the structural effects of network governance, embedded relationships and their influence on collaboration remain relatively unexplored. A case of intergovernmental

This article explores the impact that belief in an infinite afterlife has on end-of-life decisions, specifically on those viewed at the extreme, such as martyrs, suicide bombers and self-immolators. We extend a simplified expected utility-based model to include variations of infinitely rewarding afterlife’s and explore how this may impact the expected utility and rationality of earthly actions and

At their arrival in North America, travelers from the Old Continent were exposed to a radically different civilization. Among the many practices that captured their imagination was scalp-taking. During a battle, the Native American warrior would often stop after having killed or subdued the enemy and cut off his scalp. In this article, we develop an economic theory of this gruesome practice. We argue

This article tests whether latent class conflict exists in Russia. It does so by theorizing that if class conflict exists, it should be reflected in the tax policy. The article constructs an original formal model of the authoritarian tax policy choice, finding equilibria in which the local government takes into account public sentiment even in the absence of elections, in an effect that resembles a

Social norm emergence is commonly explained by stating that norms serve certain functions – for example, solving cooperation or coordination problems. But critics argue that examples of norms that do not seem to serve functions show that functions cannot explain social norms. However, both sides tend to make assumptions about how explanations of social norms in terms of functions would work. By discussing

In the past few decades, numerous experiments have shown that humans do not always behave so as to maximize their material payoff. Cooperative behavior when noncooperation is a dominant strategy (with respect to the material payoffs) is particularly puzzling. Here we propose a novel approach to explain cooperation, assuming what Halpern and Pass call translucent players. Typically, players are assumed

Theory and empirical research have established that repeated interactions foster cooperation in social dilemmas. These effects of repeated interactions are meanwhile well known. Given these effects, actors have incentives for strategic tie formation in social dilemmas: they have incentives to establish long-term relations involving repeated interactions. Perhaps surprisingly, models accounting for

I compare two interpretations of the rational choice theory: decision-theoretic and price-theoretic. The former takes the assumption of utility maximization as a literal description of a decision procedure. The latter considers it as a modeling device used to explain changes/variability of behavior on an aggregate level. According to the price-theoretic interpretation, these changes/variability are

It is always an honor when, after one publishes a study, somebody takes the time and effort to figure out how it could have been done better (Lindenberg et al., 2018; Przepiorka, 2019). It is a public service, and we are grateful for the effort. Although we are and remain quite proud of our studies and their results, there is, as in any study, always room for improvement and it is certainly important

Lindenberg et al. report experimental evidence for the effect of hedonic shifts on subjects’ propensity to engage in moral hypocrisy. Hedonic shifts are changes in individuals’ cognitive states that can be triggered by cues in these individuals’ environments such as ambient smells. Individuals in a hedonic cognitive state aim at doing what makes them feel good. Hence, the authors hypothesize that (1)

Numerous researches have indicated that men’s and women’s cooperation varied from no differences to significant differences under the influence of different contextual characteristics. In this study, we investigated how social factors together with a gender composition of a group affected gender differences in cooperation. We found that mixed-sex groups were the most effective in cooperation. At the

Political behaviour research is divided into several explanatory approaches. They have in common that they disregard, to varying extents, the social bases of their explanatory concepts. To fill this void, the present article explores the theoretical advantages of applying Randal Collins’s ritual theory to political behaviour. The central claim is that any cognitive factor, such as interests, values

In most bribery games in the literature, there is no mention of rights and duties associated to participants’ roles. Authors have hitherto relied on loaded frames, negative externalities, and the possibility of sanctions to implicitly signal prescriptive norms. We argue that participants’ interpretation of these factors may not be univocal. In this study, a participant in the role of a common citizen

The literature on nudging has rekindled normative and conceptual debates surrounding the extent to which and the direction in which people can legitimately influence each other’s actions. An oft-heard objection to nudging is that it exploits psychological mechanisms, manipulates people and thereby insufficiently respects their rational decision-making capacities. Bypassing and/or perverting people’s

What is the theoretical impact of the erosion of partisan ties on electoral abstention? This question comes from Downs–North’s theory of political ideology, which is a tool to reduce the cost of understanding the political debates. Then, when the left–right political divide becomes less visible, the costs of understanding political debates rise and electoral abstention occurs. This interpretation of

The question of how societies move between democracy and authoritarianism is of vital interest in science, as well as in the day-to-day political debate. This article contributes to this debate by exploring which mechanisms potentially encourage societies to move from democracy to authoritarianism. This article is based on the idea of traditional path dependence, tracing back to Arthur and the organizational

Standard economic theory cannot explain why so few Haredi (ultra-orthodox) men attain college degrees in Israel, despite the significant economic returns to such degrees. In addition to economic variables, this article introduces a combination of social and behavioral characteristics, such as religious identity, into the individual choice process. This, in turn, enables us to evaluate a possible trade-off

In an effort to move beyond strictness as an explanation, this article employs a most-similar case study of two congregations in order to explore the organizational features of mainline, liberal congregations that influence religious participation. Four key organizational features emerged through field research and subsequent analysis: the use of staff versus committees, provision of distinctively

The concept of institution is a rather unclear concept in the contemporary social science literature. In the “Introduction,” I give a survey of the different interpretations of the concept of institution. In the first part, I make a distinction between loose norms and tight norms, and I define the concept of institution in connection with the concept of tight norm. Institution is a system of tight

This article investigates the decision of consumers at bottle refund machines to either reclaim their bottle deposit or to donate the refund to a non-profit organization. The study documents the unique pre-intervention data on donating behaviour and introduces a field experiment to increase donation levels. The design comprised the strategic framing of the situation by highlighting different cues about

Social embeddedness has provided a compelling challenge to neoclassical descriptions of markets. Nevertheless, without a corresponding description of the micro-social forces that counter embeddedness, the description of embeddedness is essentially static, and does not integrate the dual forces of embeddedness and markets. In this study, we identify a sociological force counter to embeddedness residing

Having empirically identified institutions as critical determinants of socioeconomic outcomes, social scientists are starting to turn their attention to empirically identifying sources of institutional change. Rational choice scholars offer two theories of such change: conflict theory and cooperation theory. We highlight crucial but easily overlooked methodological issues involved in attempting to

The most investigated form of moral hypocrisy is pragmatic hypocrisy in which people fake moral commitment for their own advantage. Yet there is also a different form of hypocrisy in which people take a moral stance with regard to norms they endorse without thereby also expressing a commitment to act morally. Rather they do it in order to feel good. We call this hedonic moral hypocrisy. In our research

This article presents a new model describing a language competition situation between a local majority language and a migrant minority language. Migrants enter the society, form families, and produce offspring. Adults raise their children in either one of the two languages or both. Children then attend school, learn additional languages as adults, and produce a new cohort with its own linguistic repertoire

Economics is a powerful way of thinking. While there may occasionally be major errors in its application, at its core the principles of economics remain the strongest paradigm in the social sciences. Buddhism is also a powerful way of thinking. The central question in Buddhist philosophy is the same as that in economics: what is the key to human happiness? How can human suffering be reduced? But the

Strategic monitoring occurs in myriad situations such as principal–agent relationships, law enforcement and treaty verification. Such situations are generally known as enforcement or inspection games, with the focus largely being on the (counterintuitive) properties of their associated mixed strategy Nash equilibrium. This article instead characterizes the cooperative resolution of the mixed motives

In important contexts, people prefer option A to option B when they evaluate the two separately, but prefer option B to option A when they evaluate the two jointly. In consumer behavior, politics, and law, such preference reversals present serious puzzles about rationality and behavioral biases. They are often a product of the pervasive problem of “evaluability.” Some important characteristics of options

Employers are constantly seeking to improve employee performance by means of investing in employee training. The results of training are to a large extent dependent on employees’ willingness to behave productively in a cooperative manner. Yet, systematic evidence investigating the causal relation between training and employees’ cooperative behavior is rare. Here, we present results from a contextualized

In this study, the concept of social integration will be rebuilt along arguments from social exchange theory and applied to close ties in social networks. Visiting children at home is part of daily routine–behaviour based on trust and expectations of reciprocity. Two different approaches to longitudinal modelling of ties in network data show that, once initiated, visits-at-home ties strongly tend towards

Decision-makers often mean to react to the behavior of others, knowing that they only imperfectly observe them. Rational choice theory posits that they should weigh false positive versus false negative choices, and assess possible outcomes and their probabilities, if necessary, attaching subjective values to them. We argue that this recommendation is not only utterly unrealistic but highly error prone

On the Ides of March, 44 BC, in the Senate House of Pompey in Rome, Julius Caesar was assassinated by conspirators, the most famous of those being Brutus. Are there objectively valid reasons to confirm the possibility of a suicidal wish on the part of Caesar raised by Suetonius? By building and solving a two-player non-cooperative game that models the historical strategic aspects of the relationship