History, Expectations, and Leadership in the Evolution of Social Norms
Name
Acemoglu11-10RevAug2013.pdf
Size
634.08 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ece9e272131be9163c50635033ff9ef3
Author(s)
Acemoglu, Daron
Jackson, Matthew O.
Date Issued
May 12, 2013
Publisher
Cambridge, MA: Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Series/Report no.
Working paper, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics;11-11
Abstract
We study the evolution of a 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, influenced by occasional commonly-observed past behaviors. For sufficiently backward-looking societies, history completely drives equilibrium play, leading to a social norm of high or low cooperation. In more forward-looking societies, there is a pattern of “reversion” whereby play starting with high (low) cooperation reverts toward lower (higher) cooperation. The impact of history can be 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.
Description
This revision August 31, 2013. Original version May 12, 2011
Subjects
cooperation, coordination, expectations, history, leadership, overlapping generations, repeated games, social norms
Persistent DSpace Link
