Helpful votes received on reviews:
75% (9,244 of 12,253)
Location: Northampton, MA USA
Anniversary: August 26
In My Own Words:
Herbert Gintis (Ph.D. in Economics, Harvard University, 1969) is External Professor, Santa Fe Institute, and Professor of Economics, Central European University. He develops transdisciplinary models of altruistic and cooperative behavior, incorporating such behaviors as empathy, reciprocity, spontaneous punishing of free-riders and norm violaters, insider bias, vindictiveness, and other observed h… Read moreHerbert Gintis (Ph.D. in Economics, Harvard University, 1969) is External Professor, Santa Fe Institute, and Professor of Economics, Central European University. He develops transdisciplinary models of altruistic and cooperative behavior, incorporating such behaviors as empathy, reciprocity, spontaneous punishing of free-riders and norm violaters, insider bias, vindictiveness, and other observed human behaviors not well handled by the traditional model of the self-regarding agent. His web site, http://people.umass.edu/gintis, contains pertinent information.
Professor Gintis published Game Theory Evolving (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), and is coeditor, with Joe Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, and Ernst Fehr, of Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-scale Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and with Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd and Ernst Fehr, Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: On the Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). He is currently completing a book with Professor Bowles entitled A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution, and another book "The Bounds of Reason: Game Theory for the Behavioral Sciences."
Is most recent paper, as of this update, is "Cooperation and Cooperation" Science 319 7 March 2008: 1345-1346
His latest papers in economics include, with Samuel Bowles, "Social Capital and Community Governance", Economic Journal 112,483 (2002):419-436; with Samuel Bowles, "Walrasian Economics in Retrospect", Quarterly Journal of Economics (2000):1411-1439; ith Samuel owles, "Reciprocity, Self-Interest and the Welfare State", Nordic Journal of Political Economy 26 (2000); with Samuel Bowles, "Intergenerational Inequality." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16 (2002); with Samuel Bowles and Melissa Osborne, "The Determinants of Individual Earnings: Skills, Preferences, and Schooling," Journal of Economic Literature, (2001), and "Incentive-Enhancing Preferences: Personality, Behavior and Earnings," American Economic Review 9 (May 2001); and with Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, and Richard McElreath, "Cooperation, Reciprocity and Punishment in Fifteen Small-scale Societies," American Economic Review 91 (May 2001); and with Christina Fong and Samuel Bowles "Reciprocity and the Welfare State," in Jean Mercier-Ythier, Serge Kolm, and Louis-Andre Gerard-Varet," Handbook on the Economics of Giving, Reciprocity and Altruism (Amsterdam, Elsevier 2003).
His papers in biology, anthropology, sociology and other journals in the behavioral sciences include "Solving the Puzzle of Human Prosociality," Rationality and Society 15,2 (2003), "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Altruism: Genes and Culture, and the Internalization of Norms" Journal of Theoretical Biology (2003), "Strong Reciprocity and Human Sociality", Journal of Theoretical Biology 206 (2000), With Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, and Peter Richerson, he wrote "Altruistic Punishment in Large Groups Evolves by Interdemic Group Selection," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2003). With Samuel Bowles and Eric Alden Smith he wrote "Costly Signaling and Cooperation," Journal of Theoretical Biology, 213 (2001).
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Michael Chwe is a smart and talented economist whose multidisciplinary predilections led him to the political science department at UCLA. I know and love Jane Austen, and was skeptical of the title of this book. Indeed, I think the title is somewhat tangential to the content of the book. There are no Nash equilibria, no common knowledge assumptions, no mixed strategy solutions---all the standard fare of game theory. What Chwe has authoritatively explored is the complex back-and-forth psychological dynamics of making decisions based on psyching out what other people are thinking, and taking actions that can reverberate three or more times from one mind to another, in the search… Read more
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful
We live in an age where most passionate political activists have limited vision, the right being passionate about the horrors of government income redistribution and need to avoid budget deficits, and the left being passionately alarmed about increasing income inequality favoring the ultra-rich, and the need to counter the austerity policies that protect the big banks against losses brought about by their reckless lending practices. I must admit that I am not much concerned with either of these threats, but rather with the growing cultural rift between the intelligent, motivated, and talented upper middle class and the increasingly dysfunctional lower middle class, and especially its male… Read more
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Decriminalizing recreational drugs for adults may be the most important improvement in life for Americans and the honest people in countries that supply the US drug habit. Most recreational drug users never become addicts, but the 10% or so who do ruin the lives of themselves, their families, and those that they prey upon for drug money. Our prisons are full of people who are otherwise ordinary citizens who have only the high price of a drug habit to blame for their plight. The problem with decriminalization is that it will be effective only if it radically reduces the price of recreational drugs, which means, by a simple and almost inevitable economic logic, the amount of drug… Read more
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