Investment Behavior and Elite Social Structures in Latin America

This paper is an attempt at an interdisciplinary analysis of some of the problems relating to financial activities, decisionmaking, and social structure among elite Latin American kin and business groups. It represents a cooperative effort by two economists and an anthropologist that results, we believe, in a view of these problems that is of significance to both disciplines.As Kaplan (1965) has pointed out, the great difficulty in developing true interdisciplinary research arises in translating the concepts and theories of one field into those of the other, or in developing a new common conceptual framework. What this paper does, very briefly, is to take the basic Tobin-Markowitz model, which is an attempt to describe the decision-making process of an investor putting together a portfolio in a risky world, and modify it to allow for the difficulty of obtaining accurate information about the economic environment in Latin America.