What to maximize if you must

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Heifetz, Aviad; Shannon, Chris; Spiegel, Yossi
• 署名单位: Open University Israel; University of California System; University of California Berkeley; Tel Aviv University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2005.05.013
• 发表日期: 2007
• 页码: 31-57
• 关键词: Evolution of preferences; evolutionary stability; overconfidence; interdependent preferences

摘要

The assumption that decision makers choose actions to maximize their preferences is a central tenet in economics, often justified formally or informally by appealing to evolutionary arguments. In contrast, we show that in almost every game and for almost every family of distortions of a player's actual payoffs, some degree of this distortion is beneficial to the player, and will not be driven out by any evolutionary process involving payoff-monotonic selection dynamics. Consequently, under any such selection dynamics the population will not converge to payoff-maximizing behavior. We also show that payoff-maximizing behavior need not prevail when preferences are imperfectly observed. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.