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on Evolutionary Economics |
| By: | Jingnan (Cecilia) Chen (Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science and Department of Economics, George Mason University); Daniel Houser (Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science and Department of Economics, George Mason University) |
| Abstract: | Although economic and social relationships can involve deception (Gneezy 2005), such relationships are often governed by informal contracts that require trust (Berg et al. 1995). While important advances have been made concerning deception in economics, the research has focused little on written forms of communication. Are there certain systematic cues that signal written communications as dishonest? Are those signals accurately detected and used by message receivers? We fill this gap by studying messages written in a novel three-person trust game (we call it the “Mistress Gameâ€). We find that: (i) messages that use encompassing terms, or a greater number of words, are significantly more likely to be viewed as promises; and (ii) promises that mention money are significantly more likely to be trusted. Notwithstanding the latter finding, we find senders who mention money within their promises to be significantly less likely to keep their word than those who do not. Length: 36 |
| Date: | 2013–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gms:wpaper:1038&r=evo |
| By: | Adam Zylbersztejn (Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne - Paris School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | Several experimental studies show that ex post communication promotes generosity in situations where individual incentives contradict with common interest, like the provision of public goods. The root underlying the effect of this institution, especially in a repeated interaction, is nonetheless still obscure. This study provides a novel empirical testbed for two mechanisms by which ex post communication may affect behavior in repeated interactions : one is related to strategic signaling, the other involves emotions induces by others' opinions. The main findings are as follows. First, the presence of ex post communication (conducted through the attribution of costless disapproval points) fosters pro-social behavior and reduces free-riding. Second, I find systematic evidence that subjects tend to use ex post communication as a signaling device, whilst no evidence in favor of the emotion-based hypothesis. A possible interpretation of this phenomenon is that ex post messages are used to announce future sanctions for free-riding. |
| Keywords: | Public goods game, voluntary contribution mechanism, ex post communication. |
| JEL: | C72 D83 |
| Date: | 2013–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mse:cesdoc:13011&r=evo |
| By: | Li Hao (Department of Economics, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville); Daniel Houser (Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science and Department of Economics, George Mason University) |
| Abstract: | We report data from a laboratory experiment demonstrating that cheating is significantly deterred when a possible intent to cheat must be revealed before, rather than after, a potentially dishonest act. Further, data from independent evaluators suggests a reason: the same action is more likely to be perceived as dishonest when cheating could have been planned, as compared to cases when it seems simply impulsive. Overall, we find the vast majority of participants prefer to appear honest, but only a minority prefers actually to be honest. Finally, we conduct a type-classification analysis that implies that after establishing an honest appearance people cheat to the greatest extent possible. It follows that the “incomplete cheating†behavior frequently reported in the literature may be due more to a preference for maintaining an honest appearance than an intrinsic aversion to cheating. Length: 43 |
| Keywords: | cheating, honest appearance, partial cheating, experimental design |
| JEL: | C91 D03 |
| Date: | 2013–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gms:wpaper:1039&r=evo |
| By: | Hassani Mahmooei, Behrooz; Parris, Brett |
| Abstract: | Trust is a dynamic and complex phenomenon and understanding the factors which affect its formation, evolution and disappearance is a critical research issue. It has been shown that trust plays a key role in how human and social capital develop, how economies grow and how societies progress. In this paper, we present an agent-based model of the relations between a dynamic effort allocation system, an evolving trust framework and a reputation module to study how changes in micro-level rent-seeking traits and decisions can shape the emergence of trust across the simulated environment. According to our results, variations in trust are correlated more with the returns to being productive, rather than rent-seeking. In line with previous studies, our model shows that higher than average levels of risk-taking by agents lead to further trust and gains during an interaction, though taken to an extreme, both trust and gain can decline as a result of reckless decisions. We also report on the formation of trust clusters in our model as an emergent phenomenon. |
| Keywords: | Trust, Rent-seeking, Agent-based Model, Reputation, Effort Allocation, Social Simulation |
| JEL: | C61 C63 D72 |
| Date: | 2012–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:44919&r=evo |
| By: | Zibo Xu |
| Abstract: | This paper continues the work initiated in [19]. We adopt the same model as in [19]. We show that the non-backward-induction equilibrium component may be evolutionarily stable for any population size in a finite stopping game where the two equilibrium components are terminated by different players. A surprising result is that the backward induction equilibrium component may not be evolutionarily stable for large populations. Finally, we study the evolutionary stability result in a different limiting process where the expected number of mutations per generation is bounded away from both zero and infinity. |
| Date: | 2013–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:huj:dispap:dp633&r=evo |
| By: | Christophe Muller (AMSE - Aix-Marseille School of Economics - Aix-Marseille Univ. - Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) - Ecole Centrale Marseille (ECM)); Marc Vothknecht (DIW Berlin - German Institute for Economic Research) |
| Abstract: | We study the impact of violent conflict on social capital, as measured by citizen participation in community groups, defined by four activity types: governance, social service, infrastructure development and risk-sharing. Combining household panel data from Indonesia with conflict event information, we find an overall decrease in citizen contributions in districts affected by group violence in the early post-Suharto transition period. However, participation in communities with a high degree of ethnic polarization is less affected, and is even stimulated for local governance and risk-sharing activities. Moreover, individual engagement appears to depend on the involvement of other members from the same ethnic group, which points toward building of intra-ethnic social networks in the presence of violence. Finally, our results show the danger of generalization when dealing with citizen participation in community activities. We find a large variety of responses depending on the activity and its economic and social functions. We also find large observed and unobserved individual heterogeneities of the effect of violence on participation. Once an appropriate nomenclature of activities is used and controls for heterogeneity are applied, we find that the ethnic and social configuration of society is central in understanding citizen participation. |
| Keywords: | Violent Conflict; Citizen Participation; Local Public Goods |
| Date: | 2013–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00796194&r=evo |
| By: | Zibo Xu |
| Abstract: | We consider a fast evolutionary dynamic process on finite stopping games, where each player at each node has at most one move to continue the game. A state is evolutionarily stable if its long-run relative frequency of occurrence is bounded away from zero as the mutation rate decreases to zero. The fast dynamic process allows each individual in each population to change its strategy at every stage. We define a robustness index of backward induction and show examples where the backward induction equilibrium component is not evolutionarily stable for large populations. We show some sufficient conditions for evolutionary stability, which are different from the ones for the conventional evolutionary model. Even for this fast dynamic process, the transition between any two Nash equilibrium components may take very long time. |
| Date: | 2013–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:huj:dispap:dp632&r=evo |
| By: | Zibo Xu |
| Abstract: | We consider a basic dynamic evolutionary model with rare mutation and a best-reply (or better-reply) selection mechanism. A state is evolutionarily stable if its long-term relative frequency of occurrence is bounded away from zero as the mutation rate decreases to zero. We prove that, for all finite extensive-form games of perfect information, only Nash equilibria are evolutionarily stable. We show that, in games where a player may play at more than one node along some path, even when the populations increase to infinity, there may be some evolutionarily stable states which are not part of the backward induction equilibrium component. We give a sufficient condition for evolutionary stability and show how much extra value is needed in the terminal payoffs to make an equilibrium evolutionarily stable. |
| Date: | 2013–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:huj:dispap:dp631&r=evo |
| By: | Gosselin, Pierre; Lotz, Aileen; Wambst, Marc |
| Abstract: | We develop a general method to solve models of interactions between multiple agents, including the possibility of strategic advantage for some of them. We argue that this type of model applies to the description of apparently irrational or biased behaviors in a person whose action is the resultant of several rational structures with di�erent goals. Our main example is a three agents model, denoted "conscious", "unconscious", and "body". Our principal result is that, for an agent whose "unconscious" goals differ from the conscious ones, the unconscious may in uence the conscious either directly, or indirectly via a third agent, the body and its needs. This three agent model allows the description of behaviors such as craving, excessive smoking, or sleepiness, to delay or dismiss a task. One of the main result stands in the fact that the unconscious agent's strategic action depends crucially on whether the conscious' actions ("task" and "feeding") are complementary in time. When they are complementary, and if the conscious is not sensitive to unconscious' messages, the unconscious may drive the conscious towards its goals by blurring physical needs. When they are not complementary, the unconscious may more easily reach his goal by influencing the conscious, be it directly or indirectly. |
| Keywords: | dual agent; conscious and unconscious; rationality; multi-rationality; consistency; choices and preferences; multi-agent model. |
| JEL: | C02 C65 C70 D01 D87 |
| Date: | 2013–02–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:44421&r=evo |
| By: | Timothy W. Guinnane (Department of Economics, Yale University); Sheilagh C. Ogilvie (Faculty of Economics, Cambridge University) |
| Abstract: | This paper presents first results from a project to reconstitute the demographic behavior of three villages in Württemberg (southern Germany) from the mid-sixteenth to the early twentieth century. Using high-quality registers of births, deaths, and marriages, and unusual ancillary sources, we improve on the family-reconstitution techniques pioneered by Louis Henry and applied to good effect by the Cambridge Group and other scholars. This paper focuses on simple, standard demographic measures, in order to provide a broad overview and support comparisons with other places. An extreme system of demographic regulation operated in these Württemberg communities until around 1870. This regulation created a two-tiered demographic system. A group of “insiders” were able to marry, and experienced both high marital fertility and high infant and child mortality. A second group, of “outsiders”, were prevented from marrying. Many, especially the males, left the community; those who stayed contributed to growing illegitimacy and associated levels of infant and child mortality that were even higher than for the offspring of “insiders”. |
| Keywords: | fertility, mortality, nuptiality, European marriage pattern, institutions, community, politische Ehekonsens, Germany, Württemberg, proto-industry |
| JEL: | N33 J12 J13 K0 O17 |
| Date: | 2013–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:egc:wpaper:1021&r=evo |
| By: | Borghans, Lex (Department of Economics and Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market, Maastricht University); Meijers, Huub (UNU-MERIT/MGSoG and Department of Economics, Maastricht University); Weel, Bas ter (CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Research and Department of Economics, Maastricht University) |
| Abstract: | This research provides an economic model of the way people behave during an IQ test. We distinguish a technology that describes how time investment improves performance from preferences that determine how much time people invest in each question. We disentangle these two elements empirically using data from a laboratory experiment. The main findings are that both intrinsic (questions that people like to work on) and extrinsic motivation (incentive payments) increase time investments and as a result performance. The presence of incentive payments seems to be more important than the size of the reward. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations turn out to be complements. |
| Keywords: | incentives, cognitive test scores |
| JEL: | J20 J24 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:unumer:2013006&r=evo |