Rationality and Society

The decrease of social distance between subjects and between subjects and experimenters facilitates the deviation from purely selfish behavior in different experimental contexts. Even though the effects of social distance reduction are widely documented, little is known about subjects’ preferences for anonymity, and in particular about the willingness to remove it if they are given the opportunity. In a variant of the investment game we give players the opportunity to decrease the social distance and investigate three main issues: a) how many subjects decide to remove anonymity when this is allowed; b) how this choice is associated with their behavior in the game; c) why should rational subjects opt for removing anonymity. Evidence shows that a significant number of subjects (43.5%) expects to obtain a positive utility by meeting their counterpart and they are ready to risk and/or lose money to get this utility.

The article intends to draw attention to the selected aspects of motivation and the process of decision making in street robbery offenders. The author distinguishes three types of street robbers: ‘the rational’, the ‘bounded rationality’, and ‘the irrational’ ones. After a short characterisation of the street robbery as a specific type of crime, the article presents the definition of rationality within social sciences, followed by a reflection on the theory of rational choice, along with its applications and limitations. In the next part the reflections revolve around the theory of M.J. Apter, which – in the author’s view – creates encouraging perspective for the analysis of street robbers’ decision making process.

Justices on the US Supreme Court are rational and therefore strategic policymakers. Yet, how rational are they? How far into the future would their strategic considerations reach? Due to potential influence on both policy and doctrine, ceteris paribus they find opinion authorship desirable; when selecting cases, in addition to thinking about legal issues and the final disposition, justices strategically consider opinion crafting. To overcome the measurement error inherent to the estimation of rational behavior of the type proposed here, the Simulation Extrapolation protocol is introduced. There is strong support for the notion of doctrine-minded justices at cert. The social implications of such rational behavior are far-reaching; employing this strategy, over the course of her time in office, a justice would be able to considerably influence several policy and legal issues. In closing, implications of strategic behavior on the individual-justice level for the constitutional position of the Court within American society are discussed.

We take the view that social institution can be interpreted as equilibrium outcomes from the rational conduct of social exchanges. ‘Relation capital’ captures the idea that people make an optimal choice in their tie-makings as well as individual acts. We reinterpret from a rational choice perspective the well-known gift institution of primitive society documented by classical anthropological studies, the kula. We provide a detailed analysis of kula in terms of relation capital accumulation and fame building. The dynamic optimization perspective is applied to reinterpret various aspects of this ceremonial exchange. A formal model of the kula economy is provided to show the unstable nature of the gift equilibrium. Optimal time paths of consumption and gift-giving are derived, and a sufficient condition for the instability of the steady state is formally provided. Many qualitative discussions are characterized in terms of formal results, including the reason for the specific form of kula.