History, Expectations, and Leadership in the Evolution of Social Norms
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Acemoglu11-10.pdf
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465.09 KB
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Checksum (MD5)
c0957c8635fcdda0c8ce2b100b8e5650
Author(s)
Acemoglu, Daron
Jackson, Matthew
Date Issued
November 5, 2011
Publisher
Cambridge, MA: Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Series/Report no.
Working paper, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics;11-10
Abstract
We study the evolution of the social norm of “cooperation” in a dynamic environment. Each agent lives for two periods and interacts with agents from the previous and next generations via a coordination game. Social norms emerge as patterns of behavior that are stable in part due to agents’ interpretations of private information about the past, which are influenced by occasional past behaviors that are commonly observed. We first characterize the (extreme) cases under which history completely drives equilibrium play, leading to a social norm of high or low cooperation. In intermediate cases, the impact of history is potentially countered by occasional “prominent” agents, whose actions are visible by all future agents, and who can leverage their greater visibility to influence expectations of future agents and overturn social norms of low cooperation. We also show that in equilibria not completely driven by history, there is a pattern of “reversion” whereby play starting with high (low) cooperation reverts toward lower (higher) cooperation.
Description
August 31, 2013 revision to this paper is available at http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/81956.
Subjects
cooperation
coordination
expectations
history
leadership
overlapping generations
repeated games
social norms
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