This study addresses an apparent impasse in the research on organizations’ responses to cultural distance. We posit that cross-country differences in egalitarianism—a cultural orientation manifested in intolerance for abuses of market and political power and support for protection of less powerful actors—affect multinational firms’ choices of destinations for foreign direct investment (FDI). Us...

This study addresses an apparent impasse in the research on organizations’ responses to cultural distance. We posit that cross-country differences in egalitarianism—a cultural orientation manifested in intolerance for abuses of market and political power and support for protection of less powerful actors—affect multinational firms’ choices of destinations for foreign direct investment (FDI). Us...

Resource egalitarianism and welfare egalitarianism are two focal conceptions of distributive justice. We show in this paper that they share a solid common ground. To do so, we analyze a simple model of resource allocation in which agents’ abilities (to transform the resource into an interpersonally comparable outcome) and starting points may differ. Both conceptions of egalitarianism are natura...

How did egalitarianism emerge in early human societies? In contrast to dominance hierarchies in non-human primates, human simple forager bands are typically egalitarian, with male hunters often serving as the collective alpha. Here we present a thermodynamics-inspired simple population model, based on stochastic optimization of dominance relationships, in which a dominance hierarchy of individu...

Narcotics Anonymous (NA) supports long-term recovery for those addicted to drugs. Paralleling social dynamics in many small-scale societies, NA exhibits tension between egalitarianism and prestige-based hierarchy, a problem exacerbated by the addict’s personality as characterized by NA’s ethnopsychology. We explore how NA’s central principle of anonymity normatively translates into egalitariani...