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on Evolutionary Economics |
| By: | Benjamin Enke |
| Abstract: | An influential body of psychological and anthropological theories holds that societies exhibit heterogeneous cooperation systems that differ both in their level of in-group favoritism and in the tools that they employ to enforce cooperative behavior. According to some of these theories, entire bundles of functional psychological adaptations – religious beliefs, moral values, negative reciprocity, emotions, and social norms – serve as “psychological police officer” in different cooperation regimes. This paper uses an anthropological measure of the tightness of historical kinship systems to study the structure of cooperation patterns and enforcement devices across historical ethnicities, contemporary countries, ethnicities within countries, and among migrants. The results document that societies with loose ancestral kinship ties cooperate and trust broadly, which appears to be enforced through a belief in moralizing gods, individualizing moral values, internalized guilt, altruistic punishment, and large-scale institutions. Societies with a historically tightly knit kinship structure, on the other hand, cheat on and distrust the out-group but readily support in-group members in need. This cooperation regime in turn is enforced by communal moral values, emotions of external shame, revenge-taking, and local governance structures including strong social norms. These patterns suggest that various seemingly unrelated aspects of culture are all functional and ultimately serve the same purpose of regulating economic behavior. |
| Keywords: | Kinship, culture, cooperation, enforcement devices |
| JEL: | D00 O10 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6867&r=evo |
| By: | Angelo Antoci; Fabio Sabatini |
| Abstract: | There is growing evidence that face-to-face interaction is declining in many countries, exacerbating the phenomenon of social isolation. On the other hand, social interaction through online networking sites is steeply rising. To analyze these societal dynamics, we have built an evolutionary game model in which agents can choose between three strategies of social participation: 1) interaction via both online social networks and face-to-face encounters; 2) interaction by exclusive means of face-to-face encounters; 3) opting out from both forms of participation in pursuit of social isolation. We illustrate the dynamics of interaction among these three types of agent that the model predicts, in light of the empirical evidence provided by previous literature. We then assess their welfare implications. We show that when online interaction is less gratifying than offline encounters, the dynamics of agents’ rational choices of interaction will lead to the extinction of the sub-population of online networks users, thereby making Facebook and similar platforms disappear in the long run. Furthermore, we show that the higher the propensity for discrimination of those who interact via online social networks and via face-to-face encounters (i.e., their preference for the interaction with agents of their same type), the greater the probability will be that they all will end up choosing social isolation in the long run, making society fall into a “social poverty trap”. |
| Keywords: | Social networks; segregation; dynamics of social interaction; social media, social networking sites. |
| JEL: | C73 D85 O33 Z13 |
| Date: | 2018–03–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eei:rpaper:eeri_rp_2018_01&r=evo |
| By: | Dalgaard, Carl-Johan; Kaarsen, Nicolai; Olsson, Ola; Selaya, Pablo |
| Abstract: | How persistent is public goods provision in a comparative perspective? We explore the link between infrastructure investments made during antiquity and the presence of infrastructure today, as well as the link between early infrastructure and economic activity both in the past and in the present, across the entire area under dominion of the Roman Empire at the zenith of its geographical extension. We find a remarkable pattern of persistence showing that greater Roman road density goes along with (a) greater modern road density, (b) greater settlement formation in 500 CE, and (c) greater economic activity in 2010. Interestingly, however, the degree of persistence in road density and the link between early road density and contemporary economic development is weakened to the point of insignificance in areas where the use of wheeled vehicles was abandoned from the first millennium CE until the late modern period. Taken at face value, our results suggest that infrastructure may be one important channel through which persistence in comparative development comes about. |
| Keywords: | infrastructure; Persistence; Public Goods; Roman Empire; Roman roads |
| JEL: | H41 O40 |
| Date: | 2018–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12745&r=evo |
| By: | Tiziano Distefano (Department of Environmental, Land and Infrastructure Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Italy); Simone D'Alessandro (University of Pisa, Department of Economics and Management, Italy) |
| Abstract: | Our work contributes to explain the origin of the failure or success of international environmental agreements (IEA) and their relation with the actual aggregate global level of greenhouse gas emissions, by including climate risks, cross-country inequalities, and consumer's environmental awareness. We introduce a novel multi-scale framework, composed by two tied games, to show under which conditions a country is able to fulfil the IEA: (i) a one-shot 2x2 Game, with asymmetric countries that negotiate on the maximum share of emissions, and (ii) an Evolutionary Game which describes the economic structure through the interaction of households and rms' strategies. |
| Keywords: | International environmental agreements, asymmetry, evolutionary process, Multi-level perspective, climate change |
| JEL: | C71 C72 C73 H41 F53 Q20 |
| Date: | 2018–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:srt:wpaper:0418&r=evo |