History, Expectations, and Leadership in the Evolution of Social Norms

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Acemoglu, Daron; Jackson, Matthew O.
• 署名单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR); Stanford University; The Santa Fe Institute
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ECONOMIC STUDIES
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0034-6527
• DOI: 10.1093/restud/rdu039
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 423-456
• 关键词: equilibrium; indeterminacy; persistence; points; CHOICE; games

摘要

We study the evolution of a social norm of cooperation in a dynamic environment. Each agent lives for two periods and interacts with agents from the previous and next generations via a coordination game. Social norms emerge as patterns of behaviour that are stable in part due to agents' interpretations of private information about the past, influenced by occasional commonly observed past behaviours. For sufficiently backward-looking societies, history completely drives equilibrium play, leading to a social norm of high or low cooperation. In more forward-looking societies, there is a pattern of reversion whereby play starting with high (low) cooperation reverts towards lower (higher) cooperation. The impact of history can be countered by occasional prominent agents, whose actions are visible by all future agents and who can leverage their greater visibility to influence expectations of future agents and overturn social norms of low cooperation.