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Len Yabloko's List: Economic theory
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Aug 13, 11
"Signaling theory is useful for describing behavior when two parties (individuals or organizations) have access to different information. Typically, one party, the sender, must choose whether and how to communicate (or signal) that information, and the other party, the receiver, must choose how to interpret the signal. Accordingly, signaling theory holds a prominent position in a variety of management literatures, including strategic management, entrepreneurship, and human resource management."
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Aug 13, 11
Social network sites (SNSs) provide a new way to organize and navigate an egocentric social network. Are they a fad, briefly popular but ultimately useless? Or are they the harbingers of a new and more powerful social world, where the ability to maintain an immense network-a social "supernet"-fundamentally changes the scale of human society? This article presents signaling theory as a conceptual framework with which to assess the transformative potential of SNSs and to guide their design to make them into more effective social tools.
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In Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, Robin Dunbar (1996) argued eloquently that in human societies, language, especially gossip, has taken over the social function of grooming. Instead of removing lice from each other's hair, people check in with friends and colleagues, ask how they are doing, and exchange a few words about common acquaintances, the news, or the local sports team
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Aug 13, 11
Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it…Mr Jourdain in Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
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Back in 1974, Nobel laureate Michael Spence introduced the notion of signaling in economic thinking. According to him, when information is imperfect, individuals who possess strong qualities will send signals to distinguish themselves from the others. He takes education as an example. Suppose there are two types of individuals called, for convenience, the ‘dafts’ and the ‘defts’ (a daft classification, I know!). Employers cannot say who is who. It costs to the dafts more time and effort to become educated than to the defts. Spence shows that, if education is sufficiently costly for dafts and cheap for defts, only defts will invest in education, thereby signaling their higher productivity to potential employers. This is valid even when education adds nothing to one’s intrinsic ability (like an MBA!).
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Aug 13, 11
Signaling theory provides an opportunity to integrate an interactive theory of symbolic communication and social benefit with materialist theories of individual strategic action and adaptation.
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