In this paper we present potential insights provided by Giddens’ structuration theory to study the effects of cultural differences experienced by western companies establishing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software in their Chinese subsidiaries. We use the data from a case study of a French firm’s ERP project in its Chinese subsidiary to demonstrate the appropriateness of structuration th...

Often, when several norms are present and may be in conflict, individuals will display a self-serving bias, privileging the norm that best serves their interests. Xiao and Bicchieri (J Econ Psychol 31(3):456–470, 2010) tested the effects of inequality on reciprocating behavior in trust games and showed that—when inequality increases—reciprocity loses its appeal. They hypothesized that self-serv...

This study explores the process of organizational change by examining localized social learning in organizational subunits. Specifically, we examine participation in university technology transfer, a new organizational initiative, by tracking 1,780 faculty members, examining their backgrounds and work environments, and following their engagement with academic entrepreneurship. We find that indi...

Buildings are responsible for a large fraction of the world’s total electrical consumption. Energy awareness of residents, by means of timely electrical consumption feedback through smart metering, aims to reduce the waste of energy. Further savings can be achieved by leveraging social norms and entertainment to drive sustainable behavior. In this paper, we investigate two important pillars in ...

The adoption of mobile iTV will depend not just from the availability of suitable technologies but mainly from the limitations related to its use. As for many other examples of personal communications technologies, several issues related to the appropriateness of use in different social contexts will have an important impact in users’ acceptance of this technology. In this paper we present thre...

The authors look at online tip exchanges as parts of gift economies created by the players and designers of console and online role-playing games in Taiwan. A group of experienced players and tip contributors agreed to be interviewed about the mechanisms and processes of providing free strategy guides on the Internet. Their comments reveal needs for social approval and networking in addition to...

A natural way of viewing an inequality or a poverty measure is in terms of the vector distance between an actual (empirical) distribution of incomes and some appropriately normative distribution (reflecting a perfectly equal distribution of incomes, or a distribution with the smallest mean that is compatible with a complete absence of poverty). Real analysis offers a number of distance function...

It is known that the classic Korn inequality is not valid for Hölder α domains. In this paper we prove a family of weaker inequalities for this kind of domains, replacing the standard L-norms by weighted norms where the weights are powers of the distance to the boundary. In order to obtain these results we prove first some weighted Poincaré inequalities and then, generalizing an argument of Kon...

We begin with the development of phenomenologies and descriptive psychologies of mystical experience. The historical and cultural context for these concerns starts in the nineteenth century, where there appears a strong interest in a naturalistic philosophical understanding (Schleiermacher, Nietzsche) and social science (Tylor) of mystical and religious experience. All the great pioneers in the...

The introduction of social identity into an economic framework provides a new way in which norms can affect preferences. We present experimental results that test the impact of norms on social identity dependent choice. We use a 2 (identity prime) × 2 (choice or norms) experimental design to separately and directly elicit empirical measures of identity dependent norms for eleven different redis...