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on Evolutionary Economics |
| By: | Fiorio, Grégory; Garfield, Zachary H |
| Abstract: | In many societies, third parties may be held liable to punishment even though they did not take part in the original offence. These retributive practices, commonly referred to under the label of social substitutability, are frequently documented in the historical and ethnographic records. While previous cross-cultural research has focused on blood feuds and retributive collective violence, less attention has focused on explaining why and when third parties would be punished for offences they did not commit. We review research on social substitutability, attempt at clarifying the hypothesis space to account for its cognitive and ecological underpinnings, and offer a preliminary account for its cross-cultural variation. We integrate existing society-level measures from cross-cultural data to investigate the socioecological covariates of social substitutability. Our results suggest that systematic enforcement of social substitutability is more likely to be documented in kinship intensive societies, yet shows no substantial variation across subsistence types and continental regions. Moreover, we fail to find clear evidence that residence patterns facilitating the emergence of fraternal interest groups favor the emergence of social substitutability. Taken together, our review and results suggest that a closer understanding of local social networks and organizations may be a fruitful way to unravel cross-cultural variability in the propension to punish uninvolved third parties. |
| Date: | 2024–01–17 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:kt5ws&r=evo |
| By: | Alireza Naghavi; Mohsen Shaeyan |
| Abstract: | Qanats – traditional small-scale Persian irrigation systems – required a complex of cooperative local institutions for their construction and maintenance. We show that these institutions produced a (local) culture of cooperation in Iran that persists to the present day when qanats are no longer of economic value. We use unique geo-coded data on qanat coordinates in Iran and build an IV using grid-level geological preconditions necessary for construction and functioning of qanats: gently-sloped terrains and intermediate clay content. Qanats impact positively activities of cooperatives, as well as pervasiveness of credit institutions and trust in neighbors, particularly under stable climatic conditions. |
| Keywords: | Irrigation, Cooperation, Qanat, Cooperatives, Social capital, Trade routes, Culture, Persistence |
| JEL: | N55 O13 O53 Q13 Q15 Z10 D70 |
| Date: | 2023–05–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:csl:devewp:486&r=evo |
| By: | Mekvabishvili, Rati |
| Abstract: | Many modern societies sustain large-scale cooperation among strangers and maintain the provision of public goods through well-functioning top-down formal institutions. However, it is important to understand the differences between weak and strong formal institutions in achieving two key goals in social dilemma situations: sustaining socially beneficial equilibria and fostering individual prosocial behavior. Additionally, we need to examine what happens to cooperation when the credibility of a formal institution is undermined and what occurs when it ceases to function. In this novel experiment of a repeated public goods game, we explore the effects of an exogenous centralized punishment mechanism with a low probability, which serves as a weak formal institution, and compare it with a strong formal institution. Our findings are encouraging, as they demonstrate that even under a weak formal institution, relatively high levels of cooperation can be sustained. However, irrespective of whether the punishment probability for free riders is low or high, once the punishment mechanism is removed, cooperation breaks down to a similarly low level. This suggests that regardless of the strength of the formal institution, there is an alike effect of crowding out an individual’s intrinsic motivation for cooperation. Therefore, the application of a centralized punishment mechanism as a policy tool to promote cooperation, regardless of its strength, appears to be a double-edged sword: socially beneficial outcome and intrinsically motivated cooperation hardly can be attained simultaneously |
| Keywords: | formal institutions, public good, centralized punishment, crowding out, cooperation |
| JEL: | C90 D02 H41 |
| Date: | 2023–12–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:119659&r=evo |
| By: | Sefa Awaworyi Churchill (School of Economics, Finance & Marketing, RMIT University, VIC, Australia); Russell Smyth (Monash Business School, Monash University, VIC, Australia); Trong-Anh Trinh (Centre for Health Economics, Monash University, VIC, Australia) |
| Abstract: | We employ a natural experiment – the transport of convicts to the British colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – to examine the long-run effect of gender norms on the evolution of mateship and the formation of social capital in modern-day Australia. We find that people who live in areas in which sex ratios were historically male-biased, have higher social capital. Our instrumental variable estimates suggest that a standard deviation increase in the historical population sex ratio causes a 12.3% increase in social capital, while the reduced form estimates indicate that a standard deviation increase in the convict sex ratio causes a 5.4% increase in social capital. We show that gender norms have been transmitted within families and via marriage through assortative matching, as well as through shared remembrance in the form of war memorials in neighbourhoods in which sex ratios were historically male-biased. We explore the effect of gender norms on specific facets of social capital and find that in neighbourhoods characterised by conservative gender norms and well-defined masculinity norms due to historically high sex ratios, people are more likely to help each other, more likely to do things together and are more close-knit. |
| Keywords: | sex ratios, gender norms, convicts, social capital, Australia |
| JEL: | I31 J16 N37 N47 O10 Z13 Z18 |
| Date: | 2024–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mos:moswps:2024-02&r=evo |
| By: | Paolo Pellizzari (Department of Economics, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) |
| Abstract: | Can traders in a financial market learn whether to be informed and which information to use in their demand for risky assets? We describe in this paper an agent-based model where heterogeneous traders seek short-term profits and differ in their choices to use or discard some signals. In the model, a vector of fresh news/signals is available at every period and some (but not all) the signals affect the stochastic payoff of the stock. Under an evolutionary dynamics favouring higher myopic returns we find that, in equilibrium, traders mostly end up in either discarding all signals or being (perfectly) informed using all the relevant signals (paying the related costs). Moreover, the rate of use of information strongly depends on the "complexity" of the market: an excessively large abundance of signals to be screened or a high volatility of the market, result in large shares of passive agents who overestimate the market's risk; conversely, low market complexity is associated with a more intense use of information and aggressiveness of informed traders. Evolutionary models and Agent-based models and Information in financial markets |
| Keywords: | financial markets w information, agent-based models, evolutionary game theory, equity premium puzzle |
| JEL: | G17 D83 D91 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ven:wpaper:2024:03&r=evo |
| By: | Andrea Roventini |
| Abstract: | This work presents the evolutionary growth theory, which studies the drivers and patterns of technological change and production together with the (imperfect) mechanisms of coordination among a multitude of firms. This requires to studies economies as complex evolving systems, i.e. as ecologies populated by heterogenous agents whose out-of-equilibrium local market interactions lead to the emergence of some collective order at higher level of aggregation, while the system continuously evolves. Accordingly a multi-country multi-industry agent-based model is introduced, where the restless competition of firms in international markets lead to the emergence of growth and persistent income divergence among countries. Moreover, each economy experiences a structural transformation of its productive structure during the development process. Such dynamics results from firm-level virtuous (or vicious) cycles between knowledge accumulation, trade performances, and growth dynamics. The model also accounts for a rich ensemble of empirical regularities at macro, meso and micro levels of aggregation. Finally, the model is employed to assess different strategies that laggard countries can adopt to catch up with leaders. Results show that in absence of government interventions, laggards will continue to fall behind. On the contrary, industrial policies can successfully drive international convergence among countries. |
| Keywords: | Endogenous growth, structural change, technology-gaps, industrial policies, evolutionary economics, agent-based models |
| Date: | 2024–01–30 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ssa:lemwps:2024/02&r=evo |