Social Dynamics.
回应非经济学家对正统经济学忽视社会背景的批评，介绍“新社会经济学”如何通过同辈群体、社会网络等机制，将个体互动纳入从微观到宏观的分析，并应用于青少年吸烟、种族隔离、犯罪率等现实问题。
A common criticism by non‐economists of orthodox economic theories (for example, the theory of rational economic man) is that they fail to take account of the social context in which individual economic agents act. A related complaint is that traditional economics is reductionist in the sense that it deduces system‐wide behaviour using only the properties of the micro‐units of the system. While these criticisms are overdone because economic theories such as general equilibrium theory and game theory do in fact focus on emergent collective properties which result from the interaction between individuals, there is nonetheless an element of truth in them. In the past decade or more, a body of work has been developing, referred to in this volume as ‘the new social economics’, which addresses in a more explicit way the manner in which the nature of social interactions between individuals affects the map from micro‐economic characteristics to aggregate properties. In this literature peer groups, role models, and social networks all figure prominently; moreover, it allows that not only beliefs but also preferences of individuals are influenced by local and global interactions. The theory has been applied to, among other phenomena, teenage smoking, racial residential segregation (Schelling is an early precursor), crime rates, and technology adoption.