In the shade of a forest status, reputation, and ambiguity in an online microcredit market.

Scholars have long recognized status and reputation as pervasive forces reproducing comparative advantage in social and economic systems. Yet, due in part to methodological challenges, relatively few studies have examined how status and reputation interact. We use data from an online market for peer-to-peer lending to study independent and joint effects of status and reputation on borrowers' success at obtaining loans. First, we find a positive main effect of status, even when reputational signals are reliable and abundant. Second, we find that status matters the most for borrowers with moderate (rather than high or low) reputations, suggesting a curvilinear effect of status x reputation on loans. These results support the idea that status matters not only under conditions of too little information that creates information asymmetry, as typically assumed, but also under conditions of abundant information and too many choices that creates ambiguity about how to evaluate candidates.

Status Decreases Dominance in the West but Increases Dominance in the East.

In the experiments reported here, we integrated work on hierarchy, culture, and the enforcement of group cooperation by examining patterns of punishment. Studies in Western contexts have shown that having high status can temper acts of dominance, suggesting that high status may decrease punishment by the powerful. We predicted that high status would have the opposite effect in Asian cultures because vertical collectivism permits the use of dominance to reinforce the existing hierarchical order. Across two experiments, having high status decreased punishment by American participants but increased punishment by Chinese and Indian participants. Moreover, within each culture, the effect of status on punishment was mediated by feelings of being respected. A final experiment found differential effects of status on punishment imposed by Asian Americans depending on whether their Asian or American identity was activated. Analyzing enforcement through the lens of hierarchy and culture adds insight into the vexing puzzle of when and why people engage in punishment.

Do Reputation Systems Undermine Trust? Divergent Effects of Enforcement Type on Generalized Trust and Trustworthiness.

Research shows that enforcing cooperation using contracts or tangible sanctions can backfire, undermining people's intrinsic motivation to cooperate: when the enforcement is removed, people are less trusting or trustworthy than when there is no enforcement to begin with. The author examines whether reputation systems have similar consequences for generalized trust and trustworthiness. Using a web-based experiment simulating online market transactions (studies 1 and 2), he shows that reputation systems can reinforce generalized trust and trustworthiness, unlike contractual enforcement or relational enforcement based on repeated interactions. In a survey experiment (study 3), he finds that recalling their eBay feedback scores made participants more trusting and trustworthy. These results are predicated on the diffuse nature of reputational enforcement to reinforce perceptions of trust and trustworthiness. These results have implications for understanding how different forms of governance affect generalized trust and trustworthiness.

The false enforcement of unpopular norms.

Prevailing theory assumes that people enforce norms in order to pressure others to act in ways that they approve. Yet there are numerous examples of "unpopular norms" in which people compel each other to do things that they privately disapprove. While peer sanctioning suggests a ready explanation for why people conform to unpopular norms, it is harder to understand why they would enforce a norm they privately oppose. The authors argue that people enforce unpopular norms to show that they have complied out of genuine conviction and not because of social pressure. They use laboratory experiments to demonstrate this "false enforcement" in the context of a wine tasting and an academic text evaluation. Both studies find that participants who conformed to a norm due to social pressure then falsely enforced the norm by publicly criticizing a lone deviant. A third study shows that enforcement of a norm effectively signals the enforcer's genuine support for the norm. These results demonstrate the potential for a vicious cycle in which perceived pressures to conform to and falsely enforce an unpopular norm reinforce one another.

Production of saturated acyl L-ascorbate by immobilized lipase using a continuous stirred tank reactor.

6-O-decanoyl, 6-O-dodecanoyl, or 6-O-tetradecanoyl L-ascorbate was continuously produced at 50 degrees C using a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) with an immobilized lipase, Chirazyme L-2 C2, from Candida antarctica. Acetone was used as the reaction medium. For each saturated acyl L-ascorbate, the productivity of ca. 60 g/L reactor/day was achieved for at least 11 days. The solubility of the saturated acyl L-ascorbate in the soybean oil or water was measured at various temperatures. The solubilities in both the soybean oil and the water were higher for L-ascorbate with a shorter acyl chain. The acyl chain dependence of the solubility in water was stronger than that of the solubility in soybean oil. The temperature dependences of the solubility in both soybean oil and water could be expressed by the van't Hoff equation, and the dissolution enthalpy (DeltaH) values for the soybean oil and water were about 20 and 90 kJ/mol, respectively, irrespective of the acyl chain length. The radical scavenging activities of L-ascorbic acid and the saturated acyl L-ascorbates against 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl free radical were ca. 95% for all of the compounds, and the introduction of a saturated acyl group to the L-ascorbic acid did not affect the activity.