Studies of risk in developing economies have focused on consumption fluctuations as a measure of the value of insurance. A common view in the literature is that the welfare costs of risk and benefits of social insurance are small if income shocks do not cause large consumption fluctuations. We present a simple model showing that this conclusion is incorrect if the consumption path is smooth bec...

Current poverty measurement methodology does not allow a definitive analysis of changes in distribution, through time or between countries, which involve changes in the number or proportion of poor people. By reopening some of the discussion which has taken place around the incidence, intensity and inequality aspects of poverty, and by revisiting the continuity and transfer axioms, we show that...

Failure is embarrassing. In gambles involving both skill and chance, we show that a strategic desire to avoid appearing unskilled generates behavioral anomalies consistent with prospect theory’s concepts of loss aversion, framing effects, and probability weighting. Based on models from the career concerns literature that formalize early social psychology models of risk taking, the results show ...

Using a combination of the paradigm of conditioned taste aversion (CTA) and of the paradigm of social interactions, we report here that in the rat, eating while anxious may result in long-term alterations in social behavior. In the conventional CTA, the subject learns to associate a tastant (the conditioned stimulus, CS) with delayed toxicosis (an unconditioned stimulus, UCS) to yield taste ave...

Social stress may precipitate psychopathological disorders in susceptible individuals. The present experiments were focused on the biology beyond the differential susceptibility to social stress. Social defeat, an ethologically relevant stressor known to elicit different coping strategies, was used in two mouse strains differing for baseline emotionality, such as C57BL6/J and BalbC. In separate...

In Experiment 1, hooded rats (Rattus norvegicus) were exposed to a novel diet in a food dish or on a conspecific; they were allowed to consume the same diet and then were injected with a toxin LiCl. Later both groups ate more of the novel diet than animals that had not been exposed, and the conspecific-exposed group ate more than the dish-exposed group. Reducing aversion learning by exposure on...

In many social networks, there is a high correlation between the similarity of actors and the existence of relationships between them. This paper introduces a model of network evolution where actors are assumed to have a small aversion from being connected to others who are dissimilar to themselves, and yet no actor strictly prefers a segregated network. This model is motivated by Schelling's [...

Social learning provides an effective route to gaining up-to-date information, particularly when information is costly to obtain asocially. Theoretical work predicts that the willingness to switch between using asocial and social sources of information will vary between individuals according to their risk tolerance. We tested the prediction that, where there are sex differences in risk toleranc...

Blushing has adaptive social functions. However, blushing is also assumed to be a hallmark of social anxiety and shyness. For the first time, blushing and its relation to the expressions of shyness and social anxiety was examined in early childhood. Four-and-a-half-year-old children (N = 102) were asked to perform (singing in front of an audience) and watched back their performance in the prese...

Certain social preference models have been proposed to explain fairness behavior in experimental games. Existing bodies of research on evolutionary games, however, explain the evolution of fairness merely through the self-interest agents. This paper attempts to analyze the ultimatum game's evolution on complex networks when a number of agents display social preference. Agents' social preference...