Annie Tubadji (p)

Sameera Almalki

It is known in game theory that a prisoner’s dilemma can have a chance for cooperation if the game is played as an infinite repeated game with full information. Following the modelling of reciprocity by Rabin (1993), I show that the Culture based Development (CBD) distinction between culturally close and culturally distant agents can show when two religious people, believing in infinite life from two culturally different groups, will manage to play the prisoner’s dilemma by reaching to cooperation and when they will defect and not cooperate. An application for the case for Israel and Palestine cultural proximity is used in this study. The findings clarify how a cultural narrative decreasing the cultural distance can serve to switch the noncooperation between the two groups into cooperation mode based on their faith in life after death.

Sameera Almalki (p), Annie TUBADJI, Lauren Stodolnic

Annie Tubadji

Recent entrepreneurship literature has delved into the barriers and motivations of European female entrepreneurs. The current study aims to compare what is the effect of cultural narratives on the barriers and motivations for female entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia in comparison to these for female entrepreneurs in the UK. The presence of cultural distance or cultural proximity in the barriers and their cultural narrative motivations across Saudi Arabia and the UK is the empirical question. To address this question, we do two types of data collection. Firstly, we replicate a survey conducted among British female entrepreneurs by asking the translated version of the same questionnaire for Saudi Arabian female entrepreneurs. Thus, we obtain a perfectly comparable set of observations for both countries. We collected all in all over 200 responses from Saudi Arabia and we compare them with the secondary data obtained from the UK survey (114 observations). Secondly, we obtain cultural variables to quantify the local cultural narratives. For the UK we use the Understanding Society Survey data on cultural participation. We collected comparable cultural participation indicators for the case of Saudi Arabia. Thus, we ultimately conduct regression analysis using a recursive model, where the female engagement in entrepreneurship is explained with certain barriers and motivations which are on their side explained by local cultural contextualization in the level of cultural heritage and living culture consumed in the locality where the person lives.