P Seabright
Biographic Data
| ID | 48151 |
|---|---|
| NAME | P Seabright |
| GIVEN NAMES | P |
| FAMILY NAME | Seabright |
| SIGNATURE | SEABRIGHT P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Toulouse School of Economics |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3725-3098 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 60 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Religious Doctrine and Politics
When religion and politics become entangled with each other, which one has the upper hand? Do politicians simply instrumentalize religion for their own purposes? Or does involvement with religion constrain what politicians can get away with? If it does, is that because of the content of religious doctrine? Or is it simply because religious movements, like any other coordinated movements of citizens, have political weight?
The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People
A novel economic interpretation of how religions have become so powerful in the modern world Religion in the twenty-first century is alive and well across the world, despite its apparent decline in North America and parts of Europe. Vigorous competition between and within religious movements has led to their accumulating great power and wealth. Religions in many traditions have honed their competitive strategies over thousands of years. Today, th…
What Do Parents Want? Parental Spousal Preferences in China
In many societies, parents are involved in selecting a spouse for their child, integrating this with decisions about premarital investment such as education. Do spousal preferences of parents and children conflict? We estimate parents’ spousal preferences based on survey choices between random profiles, elicited from parents or other relatives who actively search for a spouse on behalf of their adult child in Kunming, China. We simulate marriage …
Betting on the lord: Lotteries and religiosity in Haiti
Evaluating social contract theory in the light of evolutionary social science
The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham
Book Review| January 01 2021 The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham Wrangham, Richard, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution (London: Profile, 2019), 400 pp. Paul Seabright Paul Seabright Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2021) 27 (1): 110. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-87…
Joint Ownership of Production Projects as a Commitment Device against Interest Groups
This paper investigates an unexplored rationale for joint ownership of a production project. We model projects with autocorrelated productivity shocks as creating an option value of investing over time so that later investments benefit from the information revealed by the realization of earlier investments. However, internal and external interest groups may pressurize owners into paying out early revenues. Joint ownership provides a commitment me…
God Insures those Who Pay? Formal Insurance and Religious Offerings in Ghana
This article provides experimental support for the hypothesis that insurance can be a motive for religious donations. We randomize enrollment of members of a Pentecostal church in Ghana into a commercial funeral insurance policy. Then church members allocate money between themselves and a set of religious goods in a series of dictator games with significant stakes. Members enrolled in insurance give significantly less money to their own church co…
On the origins of enchantment: Not such a puzzle
The fact that adherents of most religions subscribe sincerely to many counter-empirical beliefs has been argued to pose a challenge to evolutionary explanations of religion, since natural selection is considered to have developed sophisticated cognitive mechanisms to enable prehistoric foragers to survive in harsh environments. I argue here that most counter-empirical beliefs held by members of most religions are optional most of the time, and we…
Skepticism and manipulation: A comment on Kim Sterelny
"Skepticism and manipulation: a comment on Kim Sterelny." Religion, Brain & Behavior, 8(4), pp. 443–444
Parent-offspring conflict over mate choice: An experimental study in China
Both parents and offspring have evolved mating preferences that enable them to select mates and children-in-law to maximize their inclusive fitness. The theory of parent-offspring conflict predicts that preferences for potential mates may differ between parents and offspring: individuals are expected to value biological quality more in their own mates than in their offspring's mates and to value investment potential more in their offspring's mate…
Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies
Book Review| September 01 2016 Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies Roelvink, Gerda, Martin, Kevin St., and Gibson-Graham, J. K., eds., Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 384 pp. Paul Seabright Paul Seabright Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2016) 22 (3): 509–510. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-3634163 C…
Religion and Entrepreneurship: A Match Made in Heaven
Funding from the ANR Labex Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse is gratefully acknowledged.There is a very old question in social science about whether religion is favorable or antithetical to economic activity. There have of course been ascetic currents within all of the world’s major religions. Right up to the present day, denunciations of the commercial spirit, and more generally of the excesses associated with economic development, can be…
The Schubert Effect: When Flourishing Businesses Crowd Out Human Capital
Honest signaling in trust interactions: Smiles Rated as Genuine Induce Trust and Signal Higher Earning Opportunities
We test the hypothesis that smiles perceived as honest serve as a signal that has evolved to induce cooperation in situations requiring mutual trust.Potential trustees (84 participants from Toulouse, France) made two video clips averaging around 15 seconds for viewing by potential senders before the latter decided whether to 'send' or 'keep' a lower stake (4 euros) or higher stake (8 euros).Senders (198 participants from Lyon, France) made trust …
Soviet power plus electrification: What is the long-run legacy of communism
The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present
As countless love songs, movies, and self-help books attest, men and women have long sought different things. The result? Seemingly inevitable conflict. Yet we belong to the most cooperative species on the planet. Isn't there a way we can use this capacity to achieve greater harmony and equality between the sexes? In The War of the Sexes , Paul Seabright argues that there is--but first we must understand how the tension between conflict and coope…
Do women have longer conversations? Telephone evidence of gendered communication strategies
The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life - Revised Edition
The Company of Strangers shows us the remarkable strangeness, and fragility, of our everyday lives. This completely revised and updated edition includes a new chapter analyzing how the rise and fall of social trust explain the unsustainable boom in the global economy over the past decade and the financial crisis that succeeded it. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, history, psychology, and literature, Paul Seabright explores how our …
Intermediation by aid agencies
The evolution of fairness norms: An essay on Ken Binmore's Natural Justice
This article sets out and comments on the arguments of Binmore's Natural Justice, and specifically on the empirical hypotheses that underpin his social contract view of the foundations of justice. It argues that Binmore's dependence on the hypothesis that individuals have purely self-regarding preferences forces him to claim that mutual monitoring of free-riding behavior was sufficiently reliable to enforce cooperation in hunter-gatherer societie…
The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France
Book Review| January 01 2003 The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France Paul Seabright Paul Seabright Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2003) 9 (1): 162–163. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-9-1-162-a Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Paul Seabright; The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. Common Knowledge 1 January 2003; 9 (1): 162–163. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754…
Competition, Privatisation and Productive Efficiency: Evidence From the Airline Industry
We use data from the airline industry to examine the extent to which the costs of airline operations are affected by rents accruing to workers, and the extent to which these rents depend inter alia upon the degree of competition in the industry. Our empirical results based on a panel of twelve European and seven major United States airlines confirm that state ownership substantially increases rents to labour, while the effects of competition are …
Accountability and decentralisation in government: An incomplete contracts model
Value in Ethics and Economics
Managing Local Commons: Theoretical Issues in Incentive Design
Local commons encompass a wide range of resources whose shared feature is the need for some form of collective management. In what follows, we shall be concerned mainly with the problems of implementing a collective management plan. Whatever the mechanisms invoked, many recent contributions to the literature have stressed that relatively informal collective management of common property resources can in the right circumstances avoid the severe re…
Honest signaling in trust interactions: Smiles Rated as Genuine Induce Trust and Signal Higher Earning Opportunities
We test the hypothesis that smiles perceived as honest serve as a signal that has evolved to induce cooperation in situations requiring mutual trust.Potential trustees (84 participants from Toulouse, France) made two video clips averaging around 15 seconds for viewing by potential senders before the latter decided whether to 'send' or 'keep' a lower stake (4 euros) or higher stake (8 euros).Senders (198 participants from Lyon, France) made trust …
Competition, Privatisation and Productive Efficiency: Evidence From the Airline Industry
We use data from the airline industry to examine the extent to which the costs of airline operations are affected by rents accruing to workers, and the extent to which these rents depend inter alia upon the degree of competition in the industry. Our empirical results based on a panel of twelve European and seven major United States airlines confirm that state ownership substantially increases rents to labour, while the effects of competition are …
Evaluating social contract theory in the light of evolutionary social science
Parent-offspring conflict over mate choice: An experimental study in China
Both parents and offspring have evolved mating preferences that enable them to select mates and children-in-law to maximize their inclusive fitness. The theory of parent-offspring conflict predicts that preferences for potential mates may differ between parents and offspring: individuals are expected to value biological quality more in their own mates than in their offspring's mates and to value investment potential more in their offspring's mate…
Soviet power plus electrification: What is the long-run legacy of communism
Do women have longer conversations? Telephone evidence of gendered communication strategies
What Do Parents Want? Parental Spousal Preferences in China
In many societies, parents are involved in selecting a spouse for their child, integrating this with decisions about premarital investment such as education. Do spousal preferences of parents and children conflict? We estimate parents’ spousal preferences based on survey choices between random profiles, elicited from parents or other relatives who actively search for a spouse on behalf of their adult child in Kunming, China. We simulate marriage …
Religion and Entrepreneurship: A Match Made in Heaven
Funding from the ANR Labex Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse is gratefully acknowledged.There is a very old question in social science about whether religion is favorable or antithetical to economic activity. There have of course been ascetic currents within all of the world’s major religions. Right up to the present day, denunciations of the commercial spirit, and more generally of the excesses associated with economic development, can be…
The Pursuit of Unhappiness: Paradoxical Motivation and the Subversion of Character in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady
Identifying investment opportunities for the poor: Evidence from the livestock market in South India
Public action that seeks to alleviate poverty by providing subsidised credit to target groups of borrowers must rely on the ability of those borrowers to identify productive investments. This article presents evidence, from two villages in Southern India, that participants in the Integrated Rural Development Programme have made substantially less productive livestock investments than a control group of privately funded livestock farmers. The main…
Quality of livestock assets under selective credit schemes
The Quality of Life
This volume gathers the thoughts of reputed academics in economics, social policy, philosophy, and the social sciences as they scrutinize contentions regarding quality of life and the way in which it is, it can be, and ought to be measured. Such debates roughly boil down to the merits and shortcomings of measuring the quality of human life in terms of utility, as well as to the advantages and pitfalls of alternatives to the utilitarian approach. …
Pluralism and the Standard of Living
The proper province of a government's economic policy is the enhancement of the standard of living of its citizens. Such a remark, while true, is hardly informative. For in what does the standard of living consist? The intention of this paper is to sketch part of an answer to this question, involving some necessary (though not sufficient) conditions that characterize the concept. In particular, I want to examine how a notion of the standard of li…
Managing Local Commons: Theoretical Issues in Incentive Design
Local commons encompass a wide range of resources whose shared feature is the need for some form of collective management. In what follows, we shall be concerned mainly with the problems of implementing a collective management plan. Whatever the mechanisms invoked, many recent contributions to the literature have stressed that relatively informal collective management of common property resources can in the right circumstances avoid the severe re…
Value in Ethics and Economics
Accountability and decentralisation in government: An incomplete contracts model
Competition, Privatisation and Productive Efficiency: Evidence From the Airline Industry
We use data from the airline industry to examine the extent to which the costs of airline operations are affected by rents accruing to workers, and the extent to which these rents depend inter alia upon the degree of competition in the industry. Our empirical results based on a panel of twelve European and seven major United States airlines confirm that state ownership substantially increases rents to labour, while the effects of competition are …
The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France
Book Review| January 01 2003 The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France Paul Seabright Paul Seabright Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2003) 9 (1): 162–163. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-9-1-162-a Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Paul Seabright; The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. Common Knowledge 1 January 2003; 9 (1): 162–163. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754…
Intermediation by aid agencies
The evolution of fairness norms: An essay on Ken Binmore's Natural Justice
This article sets out and comments on the arguments of Binmore's Natural Justice, and specifically on the empirical hypotheses that underpin his social contract view of the foundations of justice. It argues that Binmore's dependence on the hypothesis that individuals have purely self-regarding preferences forces him to claim that mutual monitoring of free-riding behavior was sufficiently reliable to enforce cooperation in hunter-gatherer societie…
The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life - Revised Edition
The Company of Strangers shows us the remarkable strangeness, and fragility, of our everyday lives. This completely revised and updated edition includes a new chapter analyzing how the rise and fall of social trust explain the unsustainable boom in the global economy over the past decade and the financial crisis that succeeded it. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, history, psychology, and literature, Paul Seabright explores how our …
Do women have longer conversations? Telephone evidence of gendered communication strategies
The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present
As countless love songs, movies, and self-help books attest, men and women have long sought different things. The result? Seemingly inevitable conflict. Yet we belong to the most cooperative species on the planet. Isn't there a way we can use this capacity to achieve greater harmony and equality between the sexes? In The War of the Sexes , Paul Seabright argues that there is--but first we must understand how the tension between conflict and coope…
Soviet power plus electrification: What is the long-run legacy of communism
The Schubert Effect: When Flourishing Businesses Crowd Out Human Capital
Honest signaling in trust interactions: Smiles Rated as Genuine Induce Trust and Signal Higher Earning Opportunities
We test the hypothesis that smiles perceived as honest serve as a signal that has evolved to induce cooperation in situations requiring mutual trust.Potential trustees (84 participants from Toulouse, France) made two video clips averaging around 15 seconds for viewing by potential senders before the latter decided whether to 'send' or 'keep' a lower stake (4 euros) or higher stake (8 euros).Senders (198 participants from Lyon, France) made trust …
Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies
Book Review| September 01 2016 Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies Roelvink, Gerda, Martin, Kevin St., and Gibson-Graham, J. K., eds., Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 384 pp. Paul Seabright Paul Seabright Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2016) 22 (3): 509–510. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-3634163 C…
Religion and Entrepreneurship: A Match Made in Heaven
Funding from the ANR Labex Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse is gratefully acknowledged.There is a very old question in social science about whether religion is favorable or antithetical to economic activity. There have of course been ascetic currents within all of the world’s major religions. Right up to the present day, denunciations of the commercial spirit, and more generally of the excesses associated with economic development, can be…
Skepticism and manipulation: A comment on Kim Sterelny
"Skepticism and manipulation: a comment on Kim Sterelny." Religion, Brain & Behavior, 8(4), pp. 443–444
Parent-offspring conflict over mate choice: An experimental study in China
Both parents and offspring have evolved mating preferences that enable them to select mates and children-in-law to maximize their inclusive fitness. The theory of parent-offspring conflict predicts that preferences for potential mates may differ between parents and offspring: individuals are expected to value biological quality more in their own mates than in their offspring's mates and to value investment potential more in their offspring's mate…
Joint Ownership of Production Projects as a Commitment Device against Interest Groups
This paper investigates an unexplored rationale for joint ownership of a production project. We model projects with autocorrelated productivity shocks as creating an option value of investing over time so that later investments benefit from the information revealed by the realization of earlier investments. However, internal and external interest groups may pressurize owners into paying out early revenues. Joint ownership provides a commitment me…
God Insures those Who Pay? Formal Insurance and Religious Offerings in Ghana
This article provides experimental support for the hypothesis that insurance can be a motive for religious donations. We randomize enrollment of members of a Pentecostal church in Ghana into a commercial funeral insurance policy. Then church members allocate money between themselves and a set of religious goods in a series of dictator games with significant stakes. Members enrolled in insurance give significantly less money to their own church co…
On the origins of enchantment: Not such a puzzle
The fact that adherents of most religions subscribe sincerely to many counter-empirical beliefs has been argued to pose a challenge to evolutionary explanations of religion, since natural selection is considered to have developed sophisticated cognitive mechanisms to enable prehistoric foragers to survive in harsh environments. I argue here that most counter-empirical beliefs held by members of most religions are optional most of the time, and we…
Economics (19 works) · Political science (11 works) · Business (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Microeconomics (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works)