Costly Signaling (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only LuAnn Wandsnider.

Homesteaders colonizing central Nebraska (Central Plains, USA) in the late 1800s constructed communities that varied in terms of ethnic heterogeneity as well as across other dimensions. Costly signaling tenets explored to date suggest that for multi-lingual and multi-ethnic communities, we expect material culture, in this case, homestead size and ornateness, to index family capacities; in linguistically and ethnically homogenous communities, such a material signal may have had less saliency....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fraser Neiman.

For sixty years archaeologists studying the early-modern Atlantic world have relied on the decline in the stem-hole diameters of clay-tobacco pipes to date their sites. But they have been incurious about the causal dynamics responsible for the ocean-spanning secular trend and variation around it. In this paper I draw on costly signaling theory to a build a simple model of change in marketing strategies of producers and the signaling strategies of consumers that might account for the trend. I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Morrison. Carl Lipo.

Despite, its small size and marginal environment, Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) boasts some of the world’s most impressive monumental ceremonial architecture. While the production of ahu and moai have been linked to an assumed collapse of Rapa Nui society, we suggest instead that the construction of these stone monuments contributed to social stability by reducing inter-group violence and endemic warfare. To examine this hypothesis, we develop a theoretical agent-based model using concepts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Courtney L.C. Ziska.

In the late nineteenth-century, while eastern U.S. cities thrived as magnets of immigration, the lesser-known cities west of the Mississippi struggled to retain what populations they could attract, especially in the face of natural and financial disasters. These cities had to find ways of signaling their strengths in order promote increased settlement and stronger economies, so that they could compete with other cities on both regional and national scales. As this paper will demonstrate, one...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Church.

The elites of Florence, Italy built a huge number of palaces during the city state’s period of republican government between 1282 and 1532. Intuitively, these palaces seem like a perfect fit with the predictions of costly signaling theory: they were expensive, highly visible, and vast, and the families that commissioned their construction viewed them as ways of reflecting and producing status. But were these structures costly signals, or did elites spend money on lavish houses simply because...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Boone.

Everyone agrees that conspicuous consumption is some kind of social display, but what kind of display is it? I argue that conspicuous consumption is (or is like) a territorial display in social space, wherein social space is defined as a kind of virtual territory in which resources produced by collective action with a social group are allocated and defended. There is general agreement that conspicuous consumption involves the expenditure of surplus production, but there is continuing debate over...