A new measure of labor market tightness on workers' behavior--the employment rent--is modeled as a determinant of workplace conflict. An empirical estimate of the employment rent--workers' expected cost of job loss--is calculated. It is argued that the cost of job loss affects strike incidence. This relationship is tested by estimating an econometric model of strike incidence for the United States from 1955 to 1983. The cost of job loss is shown to explain a large percentage of the variation in strike incidence. The cost of job loss is a far superior explanatory variable than the unemployment rate, which is commonly used in strike models.

Our theory of cultural-institutional persistence and innovation is based on uncoordinated updating of individual social norms and contracts, so that both culture and institutions co-evolve. We explain why Pareto-dominated cultural-institutional configurations may persist over long periods and how transitions nonetheless occur. In our model the exercise of elite power plays no role in either persistence or innovation, and transitions occur endogenously. This is unlike models in which elites impose inferior institutions or cultures as a self-interested distributional strategy. We show that persistence will be greater the more inferior is the Pareto-dominated configuration and the more rational and individualistic is the population.

Motivated by historical examples and ideas from socio-linguistics, in particular the “non-reciprocal power semantic” of Brown and Gilman (1960), we extend evolutionary models of language to incorporate intentional linguistic innovations among conventions that may convey social superiority and inferiority, despite being ambiguous, in the sense of less efficiency in communicating information. We show that egalitarian and unambiguous linguistic conventions can be stochastically stable but also identify conditions under which ambiguous linguistic conventions that are imperfect signals of status differences may be stochastically stable.

In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies by Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis and Richard McElreath. Published in volume 91, issue 2, pages 73-78 of American Economic Review, May 2001