Economics Insights @ CBS

The present article offers a conceptual model for how the cognitive processes associated with perspective-taking facilitate social coordination and foster social bonds. We suggest that the benefits of perspective-taking accrue through an increased self-other overlap in cognitive representations and discuss the implications of this perspective-taking induced self-other overlap for stereotyping and prejudice.

Participants recalled instances when they felt vicariously ashamed or guilty for another's wrongdoing and rated their appraisals of the event and resulting motivations. The study tested aspects of social association that uniquely predict vicarious shame and guilt. Results suggest that the experience of vicarious shame and vicarious guilt are distinguishable. Vicarious guilt was predicted by one's perceived interdependence with the wrongdoer (e.g., high interpersonal interaction), an appraisal of control over the event, and a motivation to repair the other person's wrongdoing.

This paper investigates the effect of decision-makers'culture on their implicit choice of how to make decisions. In a content analysis of major decisions described in American and Chinese twentieth-century novels, we test a series of hypotheses based on prior theoretical and empirical investigations of cross-cultural variation in human motivation and decision processes.

We present a theory of cultural evolution based upon a renormalization group scheme. We consider rational but cognitively limited agents who optimize their decision-making process by iteratively updating and refining the mental representation of their natural and social environment. These representations are built around the most important degrees of freedom of their world. Cultural coherence among agents is defined as the overlap of mental representations and is characterized using an adequate order parameter.

We consider a model of a service system that delivers two nonsubstitutable services to a market of heterogenous users. The first service is delivered subject to a "guaranteed" (G) processing rate, and the second is a "best-effort" (BE) type service in which residual capacity not allocated to the guaranteed class is shared among BE users. Users, in turn, are sensitive to both price and congestion-related effects. The service provider's objective is to optimally design the system so as to extract maximum revenues.