Maurice Bokanga is a sociologist that studies the relationship between patterns of trust and cooperation, and the structure of economic relations in a group or society. He has analyzed egocentric network data collected from 75 villages in Karnataka, a state in southern India, to assess the relationship between bank account ownership and patterns of reported social relations across caste boundaries. He has designed a social exchange experiment to test how different forms of dyadic exchange affect prosocial behavior towards a third party.  He has contributed to mathematical sociology by deriving closed-form solutions from a mathematical model of other-regarding preferences, showing how structural properties of the distribution of concern in a group lead to sociologically interesting equilibrium distributions of concern, and how this can transform social dilemmas into situations that afford cooperation (and vice-versa). He has also collaborated on work involving the use of ecological diversity measures for social data, the relationship between economic networks and political culture, and the prospects of using artificial intelligence to learn about human social life.