We develop an approach which escapes Arrow’s impossibility by relying on information about agents’ indi¤erence curves instead of utilities. In a model where agents have unequal production skills and di¤erent preferences, we characterize social ordering functions which rely only on ordinal non-comparable information about individual preferences. These social welfare functions are required to sat...

While most research on use and non-use focuses on the adoption or rejection of technology, this paper proposes “situational non-use” as a framework to examine occasional non-use behaviors for established users of social technologies. I introduce the concepts of obfuscation and self-censorship as situational non-use practices and explore them in reflections of ongoing research projects. Author

This paper provides a concept and a notation for optimizing the design of social processes in gaming and learning for individuals, groups of individuals and society as a whole. Traditional approaches to the mapping and designing of the emerging social dynamics in a joyful, social education setting have fallen short of producing desirable results due to the lack of joint consideration of social ...

Econometric analysis typically focuses on the statistical properties of fixed estimators. In practice, however, researchers may have preferences over estimates and engage in specification searches. In this paper, I approach the analysis of experimental data as a mechanism-design problem. Specifically, I focus on covariate adjustments, which can increase precision, but open the door to bias when...

Sleep, which is evolutionarily conserved across species, is a biological imperative that cannot be ignored or replaced. However, the percentage of habitually sleep-restricted adults has increased in recent decades. Extended work hours and commutes, shift work schedules, and television viewing are particularly potent social factors that influence sleep duration. Chronic partial sleep restriction...

Social dilemmas arise when people follow their own best interests, yet the consequence of their separate choices is sub-optimal for all of them. Monetary payoffs, however, do not necessarily define best interests. “Best” is constructed and can depend strongly on social context. Two studies successfully manipulated and measured group affiliation. Increased saliency of the group and of social goa...

In a series of two experiments, we examined 5-year-old children’s motivations for learning new conventional actions. Children watched two teachers open a novel container; the teachers differed in the nonfunctional, conventional actions they used in the process. In Experiment 1, one teacher spoke with a native accent and the other spoke with a nonnative accent. Children showed a preference for f...

Online social networks improve social experience by connecting users with common interests. Similar to real life, seeking good friends is much easier with recommendations in online social networks. In this paper, we investigate a series of problems related to friendship formation in the hope of improving friend recommendation in social networks. Specially, we seek to understand whether users wh...

Simona Botti is Assistant Professor of Marketing, S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University (e-mail: sb376@ cornell.edu). Sheena S. Iyengar is Associate Professor of Management, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University (e-mail: [email protected]). The authors thank John Lynch, Alex Chernev, Kristin Diehl, and Anu Mitra for their careful, insightful review of a prev...

Conventional evolutionary game theory predicts that natural selection favours the selfish and strong even though cooperative interactions thrive at all levels of organization in living systems. Recent investigations demonstrated that a limiting factor for the evolution of cooperative interactions is the way in which they are organized, cooperators becoming evolutionarily competitive whenever in...