10 posts · 5,208 views
A blog on economics and political philosophy. It focuses on the economics of (in)equality, education and cooperation and how these affect Africa, and South Africa in particular.
Simon Halliday
10 posts
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- April 13, 2010
- 05:42 AM
- 355 views
The Parochial and the Cosmopolitan - Globalization helps cooperation
by Simon Halliday in Amanuensis
Continuing my trend of reporting on papers about cooperation, I thought I'd comment on a recent paper by Nancy Buchan and co-authors about human cooperation and globalization. I've argued previously about the role of parochialism in punishment and in theories about the evolution of war and cooperation, today, though, the theme is the extent to which more cosmopolitan countries tend to foster individuals who are more willing to cooperate globally. Sounds intuitive, but how does it work experim........ Read more »
Buchan, N., Grimalda, G., Wilson, R., Brewer, M., Fatas, E., & Foddy, M. (2009) Globalization and human cooperation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(11), 4138-4142. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809522106
- March 12, 2010
- 03:40 PM
- 366 views
Explain your total sheep played
by Simon Halliday in Amanuensis
When you come across a line like this in a paper, you can't help but laugh, "We now discuss and explain the cumulative number of sheep played in all rounds of the game." Yes, subjects played sheep. You may wonder how. I shall attempt to explain.In three papers based on work in South Africa and Namibia, Bjørn Vollan and, in one paper, his co-author Bernd Hayo investigate several different experiments with the Nama people. They ran trust games, trust games with third party punishment, and commo........ Read more »
Vollan, B. (2008) Socio-ecological explanations for crowding-out effects from economic field experiments in southern Africa. Ecological Economics, 67(4), 560-573. DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2008.01.015
- March 11, 2010
- 09:37 AM
- 309 views
Trusting and Bargaining in Africa
by Simon Halliday in Amanuensis
Are we Africans different to the rest of the world in our giving, punishing and trusting behaviour? Three remarkable economic anthropology studies try to examine this kind of question with several ethnic groups in four countries: the Pimbwe, Sukuma and Kahama in Tanzania, the Maasai of Kenya and the Ju/'hoan Bushmen of Namibia and Botswana. I can't to do any of the papers justice with my short comments, but I thought you might find them interesting nevertheless.The three papers take quite diffe........ Read more »
Wiessner, P. (2009) Experimental Games and Games of Life among the Ju/’hoan Bushmen. Current Anthropology, 50(1), 133-138. DOI: 10.1086/595622
- March 29, 2009
- 10:43 AM
- 707 views
Poor Blacks 'Envy' Rich Whites
by Simon Halliday in Amanuensis
Here I report briefly on a recent paper in the Cambridge Journal of Economics by Haile, Sadrieh and Verbon. I appreciate the intentions of the paper, but I believe that it was poorly executed and, consequently, their results are unconvincing. As the authors state, "[N]o study so far has attempted to disentangle the ethnicity effects from the income inequality effects." (705) Their study fails to disentangle the effects too.The authors ran trust games in two South African universities: The Uni........ Read more »
D. Haile, A. Sadrieh, & H. A. A. Verbon. (2008) Cross-racial envy and underinvestment in South African partnerships. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 32(5), 703-724. DOI: 10.1093/cje/ben011
- January 27, 2009
- 01:11 PM
- 515 views
Transitive Brains
by Simon Halliday in Amanuensis
A recent paper by Camillo Padoa-Schioppa and John Assad investigates the encoding of value in the brain for rhesus monkeys, a renewal of efforts to understand how and whether the assumption of transitivity, so crucial to the behavioral sciences, is in fact an accurate description of how individuals act when making choices. It builds on a previous paper (2006) of theirs in Nature, 'Neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex encode economic value.' The novelty in their (2008) research is that they provi........ Read more »
Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, & John A Assad. (2007) The representation of economic value in the orbitofrontal cortex is invariant for changes of menu. Nature Neuroscience, 11(1), 95-102. DOI: 10.1038/nn2020
- October 8, 2008
- 05:25 AM
- 663 views
Egalitarians behave 'trustworthily', Egotists don't
by Simon Halliday in Amanuensis
Ok, so the title of the post gives the paper more pizzazz than it really has, but hey? Today, a little discussion about Nava Ashraf, Iris Bohnet and Nikita Piankov's (2006) paper 'Decomposing Trust and Trustworthiness'.The main reason that it is of interest to me is that it used a sample of students from South Africa in Cape Town (which somehow was spelt Capetown in the paper, ATROCIOUS editing!), along with students from Boston, US and Moscow, Russia.The next point of interest is that, unlike m........ Read more »
Nava Ashraf, Iris Bohnet, & Nikita Piankov. (2006) Decomposing trust and trustworthiness. Experimental Economics, 9(3), 193-208. DOI: 10.1007/s10683-006-9122-4
- September 14, 2008
- 05:41 PM
- 624 views
Egalitarianism in Young Children
by Simon Halliday in Amanuensis
Children develop into (parochial) egalitarians, at least according to a recent study by Ernst Fehr, Helen Bernhard and Bettina Rockenbach. Children start out as selfish homo economicus style agents and turn into inequality averse parochialists. But the problem is that these aren't just any children, they are Swiss children and the cultural relevance of being Swiss has been seen in Ernst Fehr's own labs...The experiments on which the paper was based were run with children ranging from 3 to 8 ye........ Read more »
Ernst Fehr, Helen Bernhard, & Bettina Rockenbach. (2008) Egalitarianism in young children. Nature, 454(7208), 1079-1083. DOI: 10.1038/nature07155
B. Herrmann, C. Thoni, & S. Gachter. (2008) Antisocial Punishment Across Societies. Science, 319(5868), 1362-1367. DOI: 10.1126/science.1153808
- August 6, 2008
- 08:23 AM
- 574 views
Moral Sentiments and Mechanism Design
by Simon Halliday in Amanuensis
Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, considered how an individual's moral sentiments affect their acts in the world in ways that are contrary to self-interest. Smith's first sentence sets up his thinking, How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. (S........ Read more »
S Bowles. (2008) Policies Designed for Self-Interested Citizens May Undermine "The Moral Sentiments": Evidence from Economic Experiments. Science, 320(5883), 1605-1609. DOI: 10.1126/science.1152110
- August 6, 2008
- 03:48 AM
- 513 views
Giving and Taking
by Simon Halliday in Amanuensis
Are economic experiments representative of underlying sentiments, or social preferences? This was the topic of a recent series of posts I did on articles by John List two of which were in collaboration with Steven Levitt (you can find them here, here and here). One of the main papers to which List referred was a paper by Nicholas Bardsley, then a working paper, and recently published in Experimental Economics. So that's what I'm reviewing today: Nicholas Bardsley's 'Dictat........ Read more »
Nicholas Bardsley. (2008) Dictator game giving: altruism or artefact?. Experimental Economics, 11(2), 122-133. DOI: 10.1007/s10683-007-9172-2
- July 24, 2008
- 04:08 AM
- 582 views
Diversity and Cooperation
by Simon Halliday in Amanuensis
Diversity facilitates cooperation according to research published in the latest Nature. The paper fits well into the literature in evolutionary game theory on the prisoner's dilemma and public goods games. I'll give a very brief look at some of the points I found pertinent in the paper.Santos, Santos and Pacheco's main assertion is that diversity promotes cooperation, specifically:[C]ooperation is promoted by the diversity associated with the number and size of the public goods ........ Read more »
Francisco Santos, Marta D Santos, & Jorge M Pacheco. (2008) Social diversity promotes the emergence of cooperation in public goods games. Nature, 454(7201), 213-216. DOI: 10.1038/nature06940
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