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on Evolutionary Economics |
| By: | Charles Efferson; Rafael Lalive; Peter J. Richerson,; Richard McElreath; Mark Lubell |
| Abstract: | We conducted an experiment to describe how social learners use information about the relation between payoffs and behavior. Players chose between two technologies repeatedly. Payoffs were random, but one technology was better because its expected payoff was higher. Players were divided into two groups: 1) individual learners who knew their realized payoffs after each choice and 2) social learners, who had no private feedback about their own payoffs, but in each period could choose to learn which behavior had produced the lowest payoff among the individual learners or which behavior had produced the highest payoff. When social learners chose to know the behavior producing the highest payoff, a model of imitating this successful behavior matches the data very closely. When social learners chose to know the behavior producing the lowest payoff, they tended to choose the opposite behavior in early periods, while increasingly choosing the same behavior in late periods. This kind of rapid temporal heterogeneity in the use of social information has received little or no attention in the theoretical study of social learning. |
| Keywords: | social learning, payoff information, gene-culture coevolution, laboratory experiment |
| JEL: | C92 O31 Z13 |
| Date: | 2006–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zur:iewwpx:290&r=evo |
| By: | Charles Efferson; Rafael Lalive; Peter J. Richerson,; Richard McElreath; Mark Lubell |
| Abstract: | We conducted an experiment to describe precisely how social learners use information about the distribution of behaviors in a relevant social group. Players chose between two technologies repeatedly. Payoffs were random, but one technology was better in the sense that its expected payoff was higher. Players were divided into two groups: 1) individual learners who knew their realized payoffs after each choice and 2) social learners who had information about the relative frequencies of the two technologies among the individual learners but no private feedback about their own payoffs. For a subset of the social learners, a theoretical model of conformity matches the data very closely. The remaining social learners, however, made choices without responding to the social information provided. This kind of heterogeneity among social learners has received little theoretical attention with respect to aggregate behavioral dynamics. |
| Keywords: | social learning, conformity, gene-culture coevolution, laboratory experiment |
| JEL: | C92 O31 Z13 |
| Date: | 2006–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zur:iewwpx:289&r=evo |