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on Evolutionary Economics |
| By: | Marcello D'Amato (University of Naples Suor Orsola Benincasa and CSEF.); Francesco Flaviano Russo (Università di Napoli Federico II and CSEF) |
| Abstract: | We explore the long-term economic and institutional consequences of an early exposure to a fundamental technological innovation in human history, pottery. Using a data set on radiocarbon-dated pottery discoveries, we show that regions that were ex-posed to pottery earlier have been subsequently characterized by higher historical population density and by an earlier development of complex political organizations. These results hold after controlling for the timing of the Neolithic transition, bio-geographic variables, and migratory distance from East Africa. We argue that the dual role of pottery, both as a cooking and fermentation tool that improved nutritional efficiency and as a storage technology that enabled surplus management, shifted Malthusian constraints and contributed to the emergence of social stratification, institutional complexity, and early state formation. Classification-JEL: O11; O33; O47; N00. |
| Keywords: | Neolithic; Pottery Antiquity; Population, State. |
| Date: | 2025–09–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sef:csefwp:759 |
| By: | Hwang, Joon; Alam, Nurul; Shenk, Mary K (The Pennsylvania State University) |
| Abstract: | Throughout human evolutionary history, individuals have faced two fundamental challenges under uncertainty: deciding whether to take risks and managing risks through cooperation. While both risk-taking and social risk management have been widely studied, less attention has been given to how these two processes are linked—specifically, how risk-taking itself may be shaped by social networks. We test the "social capital buffer" hypothesis, which posits that greater social connectedness promotes risk-taking by buffering against negative outcomes. Analyzing social networks and risk preferences among 140 individuals in rural Bangladesh whose livelihoods range from farming to wage labor and small-scale trade, we identify distinct pathways through which social capital influences risk preference. Highly clustered individuals in financial support networks exhibit greater risk preference, suggesting that clustering facilitates risk-taking by ensuring resource circulation within a tight-knit group. In contrast, individuals with more support-receiving ties in material support networks are more risk-averse, indicating that material support functions as informal social insurance reducing reliance on risky decisions. Finally, reciprocity in material support networks promotes risk-taking only among wealthier individuals, highlighting how individual economic resources interact with social capital to shape risk-taking. These findings reveal that social capital does not uniformly promote or constrain risk-taking but serves distinct adaptive functions based on network structure, economic conditions, and resource types, balancing risk-taking and risk-avoidance to help individuals successfully navigate uncertainty. |
| Date: | 2025–09–27 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:bxt8g_v1 |
| By: | Jerg Gutmann; Anna Lewczuk-Czerwińska; Jacek Lewkowicz; Stefan Voigt |
| Abstract: | Constitutions as the formal foundation of a country’s legal and political system have important economic and political effects. Yet, we still know little about why constitutions set effective constraints on politicians in some societies, while being largely disregarded in others. Here, we ask if national culture matters for constitutional compliance. We study a cross-section of 115 countries, making use of novel indicators of constitutional compliance. We find that societies with a more individualistic population exhibit higher levels of compliance. These results are robust and extend to instrumental variable estimations. They imply a novel transmission channel from cultural traits to long-term economic development: individualistic national culture increases the credibility of constitutional self-commitments. Our analysis also supports the more general idea that the effects of formal institutions depend on the informal institutional environment in which they are embedded. Regarding religion, our results are consistent with past research that attributes the lack of development in the modern Muslim world to deficient institutional quality. |
| Keywords: | constitutional compliance, culture, individualism, Islam, long-term orientation, moral universalism, power distance, rule of law |
| JEL: | H11 K1 K42 P48 Z10 Z12 Z18 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12182 |
| By: | Xin Tong; Thi Thu Uyen Hoang; Xue-Xin Wei; Michael Hahn |
| Abstract: | Understanding the representation of probability in the human mind has been of great interest to understanding human decision making. Classical paradoxes in decision making suggest that human perception distorts probability magnitudes. Previous accounts postulate a Probability Weighting Function that transforms perceived probabilities; however, its motivation has been debated. Recent work has sought to motivate this function in terms of noisy representations of probabilities in the human mind. Here, we present an account of the Probability Weighting Function grounded in rational inference over optimal decoding from noisy neural encoding of quantities. We show that our model accurately accounts for behavior in a lottery task and a dot counting task. It further accounts for adaptation to a bimodal short-term prior. Taken together, our results provide a unifying account grounding the human representation of probability in rational inference. |
| Date: | 2025–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2510.04698 |
| By: | Gaddy, Hampton; Sear, Rebecca; Fortunato, Laura |
| Abstract: | There is a widespread belief, in both the scholarly literature and the popular press, that polygyny prevents large numbers of men from marrying by skewing the sex ratio of the marriage market. In turn, the exclusion of men from marriage is thought to lead to negative outcomes, e.g., by fueling crime and armed conflict. In this paper, we investigate systematically the relationship between polygyny and men’s marriage prospects. First, using a demographic model, we show that marriage markets are skewed sufficiently feminine, under a range of realistic demographic scenarios, to sustain some level of polygyny without locking any men out of marriage. Second, through analysis of 84.1 million census records from 30 countries across Africa, Asia, and Oceania between 1969 and 2016, we show that the subnational association between the prevalence of polygyny and the prevalence of unmarried men is negative or null, rather than positive, for almost all countries in the sample. Third, through analysis of the full-count 1880 US federal census, we show that the average prevalence of unmarried men is lower, not higher, across counties of the West with Mormon polygyny, compared to other counties of the West, and to counties of the Midwest and the Northeast; it is higher only compared to counties of the South. Overall, these findings challenge a dominant narrative linking polygyny to negative social outcomes. Drawing on existing evidence, we suggest that the observed patterns may be explained by an underlying association between the prevalence of polygyny and the strength of promarriage norms. |
| Keywords: | political science; conflict; cultural evolution; polygyny; demography |
| JEL: | J1 |
| Date: | 2025–10–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:129690 |
| By: | Joy Das Bairagya; Udipta Chakraborti; Sumana Annagiri; Sagar Chakraborty |
| Abstract: | Navigation through narrow passages during colony relocation by the tandem-running ants, $\textit{Diacamma}$ $\textit{indicum}$, is a tour de force of biological traffic coordination. Even on one-lane paths, the ants tactfully manage a bidirectional flow: Informed individuals (termed leaders) guide nest-mates (termed followers) from a suboptimal nest to a new optimal nest, and then return to recruit additional followers. We propose that encounters between the ants moving in opposite directions can be modelled within the framework of game theory leading to an understanding of the mechanism behind observed behaviours. Our experiments reveal that, upon encountering a tandem pair (a leader and its follower) on a narrow path, the returning leader reverses her direction and proceeds toward the new nest again as if she becomes the leader guiding a follower. This observed behaviour is consistent with game-theoretic predictions, provided the assumption of perfect rationality is relaxed in favour of bounded rationality -- specifically, procedural rationality. In other words, the experimental outcomes are consistent with sampling equilibrium but not with Nash equilibrium. Our work, which strives to induct the essence of behavioural game theory into the world of ants, is first ever report of realizing sampling equilibrium in scenarios not involving human players. |
| Date: | 2025–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2509.17147 |