Abstract
The major difficulty of Homans' psychological reductionism is that it lacks the way identifying given conditions which play an important role in his explanation of social behaviors. Critics have pointed out this difficulty in terms of the issue of tautology in exchange theory. To obviate this troublesome issue Emerson advocates replacing social relations with social actions as units of exchange analysis. His conceptualization of exchange relation is based on operant psychology. This is achieved without relying on the conception of motivation which is apt to lead to the pitfall of tautology.
In this paper, after the above discussion, I examine Blau's application of bilateral monopoly model from microeconomics to the exchange of advice for compliance, and consider the difference between social exchange and economic one. Finally, comparing the concept of 'dependence' with that of 'price', I show that though there is logical affinity between Emerson's conceptualization of exchange relation and bilateral monopoly model, they aim to analyze different objects.
