Thursday, May 24, 2012

Relational models theory

From Mitt Romney, One Night Stands, and the Economics of Relationships by Gabriel Rossman

An interesting discussion on the nature of relationships between people.
Human beings have a variety of ways to exchange goods and services and the ways we do so both reveals and structures the nature of our relationships. Alan Fiske's relational models theory describes four types of exchange:
•communal sharing -- people are effectively a common unit and can freely draw resources from communal property, as with households
• authority ranking -- people have asymmetric duties and obligations to one another, as with patron-client ties
• equality matching -- people match actions on a like-for-like and tit-for-tat basis, as with friends
• market pricing -- people commensurate across categories on the basis of ratios (with prices being a special case of these ratios when we have money as a unit of account), as with traders in a market

I wonder what percentage of disputes arise because of confusion when one party sees their relational model differently than the other party?

No comments:

Post a Comment