Economics and Social Interaction: Accounting for Interpersonal Relations

In Chapter 2, Benedetto Gui addresses in its entirety the challenge of accounting for the communicative/affective side of face-to-face interactions, starting with a review of the various proposals that economists have advanced for doing this. Then he proposes to view such interactions as ‘encounters’, i.e., as peculiar productive processes in which agents – besides possibly exchanging ordinary goods or delivering services – create and get pleasure (or displeasure) from ‘relational consumption goods’. He stresses the fact that the inputs of these processes include ‘relational capital goods’, i.e., durable relation-specific intangible entities, which in turn accumulate (or decumulate) over successive encounters. After discussing these concepts, he provides examples of how this conceptual framework can be used for getting new insights about various phenomena ranging from migration patterns to financial markets.