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on Evolutionary Economics |
| By: | Alberto Bisin; Thierry Verdier |
| Abstract: | In this chapter we survey recent advances in modeling cultural transmission in the economics literature. We first present the basic canonical model of the evolution of cultural traits in the social sciences. Both Economics and Evolutionary anthropology build on this canonical model but their approaches are conceptually very different. After elucidating these differences, we introduce several recent economic models of cultural transmission which address a rich set of novel and interesting questions in the literature. We present these models as extensions of the canonical framework, organized along theoretical dimensions that we categorize as pertaining to preferences and technology. We finally briefly discuss how cultural evolution represents a fundamental component - alongside institutional change - of recent theoretical work on the political economy of long-run growth. We conclude suggesting interesting areas for future research. |
| JEL: | C60 D1 N0 P0 Z10 Z13 |
| Date: | 2025–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33928 |
| By: | Gabriel, Nathan; Bell, Adrian V.; Smaldino, Paul E. |
| Abstract: | Individual social identities indicate group affiliations and are typically associated with group-typical preferences, signals that indicate group membership, and the propensity to condition actions on the social signals of others, resulting in group-differentiated interaction norms. Past work modeling identity signaling and coordination has typically assumed that individuals belong to one of a discrete set of groups. Yet individuals can simultaneously belong to multiple groups, which may be nested within larger groupings. Here, we introduce the generalized Bach or Stravinsky game, a coordination game with ordered preferences, which allows us to construct a model that captures the overlapping and hierarchical nature of social identity. Our model unifies several prior results into a single framework, including results related to coordination, minority disadvantage, and cross-cultural competence. Our model also allows agents to express complex social identities through multidimensional signaling, which we use to explore a variety of complex group structures. Our consideration of intersectional identities exposes flaws in naive measures of group structure, illustrating how empirical studies may overlook some social identities if they do not consider the behaviors that those identities function to afford. |
| Date: | 2025–06–27 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:w246t_v1 |
| By: | Olympia Campbell (TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement); Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias (UZH - Universität Zürich [Zürich] = University of Zurich); Grégory Fiorio (IJN - Institut Jean-Nicod - DEC - Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CdF (institution) - Collège de France - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Département de Philosophie - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres); Ruth Mace (UCL - University College of London [London]) |
| Abstract: | Honour cultures, characterized by violent responses to perceived threats to personal or family honour, are widespread. Honour killings, one of the manifestations of honour cultures, claims the lives of thousands of women each year, often at the hands of close relatives, representing not only a social problem but also an evolutionary puzzle. They typically follow accusations of sexual impropriety and are the most extreme manifestation of a range of punishments that control the sexual and marital choices of women. The origins of such practises remain unclear, though honour cultures frequently occur where cousin marriage is common. We propose that cousin marriage offers kin benefits through wealth consolidation yet may also generate parent-offspring conflict over marriage choices. In response, norms and punitive measures, including aspects of honour codes, may have evolved to enforce cousin marriage. To test this, we use the average genomic inbreeding coefficient of an ethnic group, as a measure of the historical practice of cousin marriage, to show that this is associated with the likelihood of endorsing honour killings across 52 ethnic groups. We interpret our findings within the context of parent-offspring conflict over consanguineous marriage and we contribute to the growing body of research exploring the relationship between intensive kinship and cultural traits. |
| Keywords: | Kinship intensity, Cousin marriage, Honour, Violence against women, Runs of homozygosity |
| Date: | 2024–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05139476 |
| By: | Oliver Brette (INSA, University of Lyon; TRIANGLE, UMR 5206, CNRS); Nathalie Lazaric (GREDEG, CNRS, Université Côte d'Azur, France; University of Gothenburg, Sweden) |
| Abstract: | In the recent decades, circular economy (CE) has attracted increasing interest from public authorities, non-profit organizations, businesses and, more recently, scholars who have proposed a variety of approaches to the concept. This article aims to lay the foundations for an original framework for analyzing CE from the perspective of the evolutionary institutionalism pioneered by Thorstein Veblen. Evolutionary institutionalism is rooted in a systemic and multi-layered ontology. It employs the Darwinian triplet of variation, selection, and retention/replication (VSR) as a fruitful framework for analyzing evolving population systems. Building on this generalized Darwinism framework, the article argues that the transition from a linear economy to a (more) circular economy should be conceived primarily as a co-evolution between business firms and industry architectures. From this perspective, it suggests centering the analysis of the VSR processes of the CE transition on the notion of business model, defined as a system of organizational routines that structures interactions between the members of the firm and the social entities of its industrial environment. |
| Keywords: | circular economy, business model, evolutionary institutionalism, generalized Darwinism |
| JEL: | B52 L20 Q57 |
| Date: | 2025–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gre:wpaper:2025-28 |
| By: | Natalie Bau; Sara Lowes; Eduardo Montero |
| Abstract: | Culture shapes how policies are made and how people react to them. This chapter explores how culture and development policy affect each other. First, we provide evidence that cultural mismatch — specifically a mismatch between project manager background and the location of project implementation — is associated with the reduced success of World Bank projects. Second, drawing on historical and ethnographic work, we show that disregarding local cultural norms can undermine well-intentioned development policies. Third, we review economic research demonstrating that cultural practices systematically shape policy effectiveness, often leading to heterogeneous or unintended effects. Fourth, we discuss evidence that policies themselves can reshape cultural norms, sometimes in unexpected ways. Finally, we discuss research on tailoring interventions to the local context and conclude with lessons for future research. |
| JEL: | N0 O10 Z1 |
| Date: | 2025–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33947 |
| By: | Kamei, Kenju; Sharma, Smriti; Walker, Matthew |
| Abstract: | This paper presents the first experimental study on how higher-order punishment affects third-party sanction enforcement in the presence of multiple third parties. The design varies across treatments the number of third parties witnessing a norm violation and the opportunities available for third parties to costly punish each other after observing their peers’ enforcement actions. To test generalizability of higher-order enforcement effects, the experiment is conducted across two contrasting societies – India and the United Kingdom – using a prisoner’s dilemma game. These societies are selected for their positions at opposite ends of the tight-loose ancestral kinship spectrum. In both societies, third parties punish defectors who exploit their paired cooperators more strongly than any other person, consistent with prior research. However, punitive patterns differ. In the UK, third parties punish defectors less frequently and less strongly when other third parties are present. However, when higher-order punishments are available among third parties, their failure to punish defectors and acts of anti-social punishment invite strong higher-order punishment from their peers, which encourages their pro-social first-order punishments and makes mutual cooperation a Nash equilibrium outcome in the primary cooperation dilemma. However, in India, overall punishment levels are lower, group size and incentive structure changes have no discernible effects, and higher-order punishments are not better disciplined. These findings support a model of norm conformity for the UK and do not contradict such a model for India. |
| Keywords: | Experiment; Cross-societal variation; Public Goods; Third-party punishment; Higher-order |
| JEL: | C92 D01 H41 |
| Date: | 2025–04–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:125206 |
| By: | Cristina Figueroa (University of Amsterdam and Tinbergen Institute); Jantsje Mol (University of Amsterdam and Tinbergen Institute); Ivan Soraperra (Max Planck Institute for Human Development); Joël Van der Weele (University of Amsterdam and Tinbergen Institute) |
| Abstract: | Social preferences depend on emotional states like compassion and anger. Since emotions are fleeting and subject to manipulation, they may generate demand for commitment. We investigate the use of commitment strategies in an online experiment (n=1, 400), where subjects decide to watch or avoid videos before engaging in a charitable giving task. We find that a video with emotional content increases giving, but is also avoided more than non-emotional videos. We estimate a structural model of state-dependent social preferences, and show evidence for sophisticated commitment to selfishness and altruism. We argue that giving can be fruitfully analyzed as a self-control problem. |
| Date: | 2025–03–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tin:wpaper:20250023 |
| By: | Sergio Cesaratto |
| Abstract: | Piero Sraffa, Pierangelo Garegnani, and Luigi Pasinetti undermined the analytical foundations of marginalist price and distribution theories and recovered the surplus approach proper to classical economists. This paper studies the comparative usefulness of, respectively, the marginalist and the modern surplus approaches for the interpretation of pre-capitalistic economies and for the theory of institutions, also in the light of Polanyi’s contribution. With this in mind, the paper examines some recent mainstream contributions concerning the origin of inequality and related institutions. Challenging, they adopt materialist explanations of the origin of inequality and institutions drawn from archaeological studies. On the critical side, these studies reject with poor arguments the classical surplus approach. Moreover, they employ marginalist concepts, in particular the relative scarcity of production factors, to explain the onset of inequality. Those concepts are of a spurious nature, especially once applied to ancient economies. In this respect, the paper refers both to Marx’s and Polanyi’s emphasis on the role of ‘embedded’ rather than market relations in ancient societies, and to Sraffa’s criticism of ‘marginism’ (scarce historical realism) to the marginalist curves related to production (Rosselli and Trabucchi 2019). |
| Keywords: | Origins of inequality, Surplus approach, Marginalism, Samuel Bowles, Sraffa’s Marginism Jel Classification: A12, B51, B52, N01, Z13 |
| Date: | 2025–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:usi:wpaper:926 |
| By: | Rémi Suchon; Vincent Théroude |
| Abstract: | Cooperation has many economic and social benefits, yet it is vulnerable to inequality. This study examines how the magnitude of inequality affects cooperation, focusing on differences in behavior between individuals randomly assigned to high (i.e. the rich) and low endowments (i.e. the poor). To do so, we use a novel dataset that pools individual-level observations from 24 published experimental linear public good games with unequal endowments. Pooling many studies allows us to study the causal effect of inequality at the participant level, with a substantial variation in levels of inequality. Such a variation would be very hard to get with a single, properly powered experiment. We start by confirming that inequality reduces overall contributions, and that the rich contribute a lower share (“relative contribution”) of their endowment than the poor on average. We further identify a striking asymmetry: as inequality grows, the relative contributions of the rich decrease significantly, while the relative contributions of the poor are not significantly impacted. Therefore, the gap in contributions across statuses increases as inequality gets stronger. We provide a simple model of conditional cooperation that is compatible with our empirical findings. These results may inform the design of policies addressing inequality and social cohesion. |
| Keywords: | Public good game, contribution gap, inequality, meta-analysis. |
| JEL: | C92 H41 D91 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ulp:sbbeta:2025-15 |
| By: | Steven Gjerstad (Chapman University) |
| Abstract: | One principal capability of markets is the coordination of information distributed among market participants who typically have competing incentives. Despite distributed information and conflicting incentives, competition among market participants often leads to socially desirable resource allocation. In this sense a market is a distributed multi-agent mechanism that, in effect, finds an optimal solution to a computational problem that is not known to any individual market participant. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that capacity of markets by defining automated agents that interact with one another in a distributed system that implements a socially desirable resource allocation. In this sense, market agents extend in several meaningful directions our concept of the function and capabilities of artificial intelligence. Market agents have been developed for single (partial equilibrium) markets going back over thirty-five years. This paper extends that research strategy in two directions. The paper reports results of simulations with automated agents in a general equilibrium market and, in addition, those agents interact in their market with human subjects in a market experiment that includes both human subjects and automated agents, so that we can better assess the bargaining capacity of the agents relative to human capabilities. |
| Keywords: | Artificial intelligence, agent-based economy, bargaining, bounded rationality, competitive equilibrium, double auction, experimental economics, general equilibrium, perfect competition |
| JEL: | C78 C92 D41 D44 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chu:wpaper:25-05 |