This Thesis contains three essays on the economic behavior of individuals. The first essay, co-authored with Andreas Blume and Douglas DeJong is an experimental investigation into the contribution of cognition in a strategic setting where the goal is to coordinate by choosing different courses...

Drawing on the social embeddedness perspective, this paper examines the impact of entrepreneurs' social capital on their firm performance in post-Soviet Russia. Based on face-to-face interviews with 75 Russian entrepreneurs in 1995, and the follow-up study in 1999, the study contrasts the...

Social Network Capital and Academic Careers: The Case of a College of AgricultureABSTRACT The relationship between economic performance and various forms of capital anchors a significant portion of mainstream economic theory and applied economics. Human, physical and financial capital represent...

An income inequality has been expanded in Japan and some policy is highly needed to revitalize rural areas. This study aims to show causative factors on regional satisfaction level by the estimation of the structural equation model (SEM) with data of each town in Yamagata and Yamaguchi...

The development and evolution of labor market structures and institutions. Particular focus on competing explanations of recent developments in the distribution of wage and salary income and in key institutions and organizational structures. Special attention to theories of worker motivation and...

Development literature has recently promoted the use of producer organization in linking farmers to better-paying commodity markets. However, empirical studies find mixed performance of such organizations. This study examines the producer organization’s internal factors that may explain the...

Institutional problems and the corruptive use of social capital give ground for misuse ofinstitutional gaps and cause intentional failures for financial benefits. Based on socialcapital theory and transaction cost economics (TCE) this paper describes how theinstitutional environment in the...

Objective of this paper is to analyse themotivations in the purchase of Fair Trade (FT) foodproducts sold in the World Shops (WS) in order tocharacterize WS consumer profiles according to theethical content of their motivations. A questionnaire hasbeen distributed, at this end, to a sample of...

Open source software systems are critical infrastructure for many applications; however, little has been precisely measured about their quality. Forecasting the field defect-occurrence rate over the entire lifespan of a release before deployment for open source software systems may enable...

The emergence of online labor markets makes it far easier to use individual human raters to evaluate materials for data collection and analysis in the social sciences. In this paper, we report the results of an experiment - conducted in an online labor market - that measured the effectiveness of...