nep-evo New Economics Papers
on Evolutionary Economics
Issue of 2019‒02‒18
ten papers chosen by
Matthew Baker
City University of New York

  1. Are we more honest than others think we are? By Claire Mouminoux; Jean-Louis Rullière
  2. Permanence in Polymatrix Replicators By Telmo Peixe
  3. The economics of parenting By Matthias Doepke; Giuseppe Sorrenti; Fabrizio Zilibotti
  4. Asymptotic Poincaré Maps along the Edges of Polytopes By Hassan Najafi Alishah; Pedro Duarte; Telmo Peixe
  5. As Time Went By - Long Waves in the Light of Evolving Evolutionary Economics By Francisco Louçã
  6. Cooperation and Endogenous Repetition in an Infinitely Repeated Social Dilemma: Experimental Evidence By Kamei, Kenju
  7. Defining institutions - A review and a synthesis By Claudius Graebner; Amineh Ghorbani
  8. TRANSFER OF BEHAVIORAL TRAITS FROM PARENTS TO CHILDREN: AN EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH By Zubair, Maria; Khanum, Ayesha; Nasir, Marjan
  9. Peer Punishment in Repeated Isomorphic Give and Take Social Dilemmas By Abhijit Ramalingam; Antonio J. Morales; James M. Walker
  10. Incorporating Belief-Dependent Motivation in Games By Pierpaolo Battigalli; Roberto Corrao; Martin Dufwenberg

  1. By: Claire Mouminoux (SAF - Laboratoire de Sciences Actuarielle et Financière - UCBL - Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 - Université de Lyon); Jean-Louis Rullière (SAF - Laboratoire de Sciences Actuarielle et Financière - UCBL - Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 - Université de Lyon)
    Abstract: While the laws are justified on the basis of the efficiency they provide to society, policy makers and researchers focus on the reasons why people violate the law. Crimes and violations induce directly costs. But there is another indirect costs that is generally ignored : the fact that a person can violate the law (whether it does or not) can reduce trust in one's honesty. Thus, even if the economic agent is honest and respects the law, this loss of confidence, which could be unfounded, is also a source of inefficiency. We introduce in an experiment, a normative rule of "decision" in order to elicit both honesty and beliefs about honesty from subjects in the lab. There is no direct transfer of money between both part to avoid any inequality aversion or altruism aversion. The main question remains how individuals trust in the honesty of an anonymous group. Subjects are split into two groups : those who are subject to the temptation of (unverifiable) dishonesty and those who value the dishonesty of others. We inform each participant that we cannot identify defection. We find an important heterogeneity of trust in honesty through subjects. On average, subjects A suggests that participants B are more honest than they are. Moreover, we identify distortion of effective honesty and beliefs about other honesty when the environment of players A is unfavorable.
    Keywords: Behavioral economics,Trust measurement,Honesty,Experiment
    Date: 2019–01–30
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-01999536&r=all
  2. By: Telmo Peixe
    Abstract: Generally a biological system is said to be permanent if under small perturbations none of the species goes to extinction. In 1979 P. Schuster, K. Sigmund, and R. Wolff [14] introduced the concept of permanence as a stability notion for systems that models the self-organization of biological macromolecules. After, in 1987 W. Jansen [8], and J. Hofbauer and K. Sigmund [5] give sufficient conditions for permanence in the usual replicators. In this paper we extend these results for polymatrix replicators.
    Keywords: Permanence,Polymatrix Replicator,Stability,Replicator equation,Evolutionary game theory,Lotka-Volterra.
    Date: 2019–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ise:remwps:wp0692019&r=all
  3. By: Matthias Doepke; Giuseppe Sorrenti; Fabrizio Zilibotti
    Abstract: Parenting decisions are among the most consequential choices people make throughout their lives. Starting with the work of pioneers such as Gary Becker, economists have used the toolset of their discipline to understand what parents do and how parents’ actions affect their children. In recent years, the literature on parenting within economics has increasingly leveraged findings and concepts from related disciplines that also deal with parent-child interactions. For example, economists have developed models to understand the choice between various parenting styles that were first explored in the developmental psychology literature, and have estimated detailed empirical models of children’s accumulation of cognitive and noncognitive skills in response to parental and other inputs. In this paper, we survey the economic literature on parenting and point out promising directions for future research.
    Keywords: Parenting, parenting style, skill acquisition, peer effects, altruism, paternalism
    JEL: J13 J24 R20
    Date: 2019–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zur:econwp:317&r=all
  4. By: Hassan Najafi Alishah; Pedro Duarte; Telmo Peixe
    Abstract: For a class of flows on polytopes, including many examples from Evolutionary Game Theory, we describe a piecewise linear model wchich encapsulates the asymptotic dynamics along the heteroclinic network formed out of the polytope's vertexes and edges. This piecewise linear flow is easy to compute even in higher dimensions, which allows the usage of numeric algorithms to find invariant dynamical structures such as periodic, homoclinic or heteroclinic orbits, which if robust persist as invariant dynamical structures of the original flow. We apply this method to prove the existence of chaotic behavior in some Hamiltonian replicator systems on the five dimensional simplex.
    Keywords: Flows on polytopes, Asymptotic dynamics, Heteroclinic networks, Poincaré maps, Hyperbolicity, Chaos, Evolutionary game theory
    Date: 2019–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ise:remwps:wp0702019&r=all
  5. By: Francisco Louçã (ISEG, Lisbon University, Portugal.)
    Date: 2019–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sru:ssewps:2019-05&r=all
  6. By: Kamei, Kenju
    Abstract: Exogenously imposed infinite repetition is known to mitigate people’s uncooperative behaviors in dilemma situations with partner matching through personal enforcement. One as yet unanswered question is whether people collectively choose to interact with each other under the partner matching condition when there exists an alternative possibility under random matching. In an indefinitely repeated public goods game framework, I let subjects democratically choose whether to (i) play with pre-assigned specific others for all rounds or to (ii) play with randomly matched counterparts in every round. The experimental results revealed that most groups collectively opt for the partner matching protocol. The data also indicated that groups achieve a higher level of cooperation when they democratically select the partner matching protocol by voting, relative to when the same option is exogenously imposed. These findings imply that people’s equilibrium selection may be affected by how the basic rules of games are introduced (endogenously or exogenously). The paper provides further evidence to suggest that the positive effect of democratic decision-making is stronger when the majority voting rule, rather than the unanimity rule, is applied.
    Keywords: experiment, public goods, cooperation, dilemma, social norms, endogenous choices
    JEL: C72 C73 C92 H41
    Date: 2019–02–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:92097&r=all
  7. By: Claudius Graebner (Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria); Amineh Ghorbani (Delft University of Technology)
    Abstract: Despite being a key term in institutional economics, the term 'institution' seems to be used in various different ways. To what extent is this problematic, given that a shared understanding of key terms among scholars is a necessary condition for scientific progress? We review prominent definitions of the term 'institution' and identify a set of shared elements of these definitions, which can be summarized as institutions being “codifiable systems of social structures (in particular norms and rules) that lead to inclinations for people to act in specific ways†. This suggests that the shared understanding of ‘institutions’ is sufficiently concrete.
    Keywords: Definitions, institutions, epistemology
    Date: 2019–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ico:wpaper:89&r=all
  8. By: Zubair, Maria; Khanum, Ayesha; Nasir, Marjan
    Abstract: It is commonly believed that parents transfer their behavioral traits to their offspring. But where does one draw the line between nature and nurture? Most of us have received our first lessons in lying, trust, generosity and even selfishness from our parents. These non-cognitive skills, like patience, ambition, tenacity etc. are all thus malleable traits if we come to prove that they are transferred from parent to their child. A field experiment was conducted at a private school in Lahore, Pakistan. These experiments measured two key non-cognitive skills that literature believes are passed onto the offspring via their parents: patience and trust. To measure the correlation between parents and children, an ordered probit analysis was employed. Our findings show that there is a strong negative relationship between child’s patience to that of her parent. Child and parent trust display no significant relationship. However, a positive significant relationship was analyzed between child reciprocity and parent reciprocity.
    Keywords: behavioral games, trust, patience, intergenerational transfers
    JEL: D19
    Date: 2018–10–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:92121&r=all
  9. By: Abhijit Ramalingam; Antonio J. Morales; James M. Walker
    Abstract: This study brings together two strands of experimental literature, “Give and Take” versions of strategically and payoff isomorphic linear public goods games and the effectiveness of peer punishment in promoting cooperation in repeated fixed-group game settings. We find evidence of lower cooperation in the Take game setting, primarily due to a greater decrease in cooperation in later decision rounds. Importantly, we also find that peer punishment is able to overcome the decrease in cooperation in the Take game, leading to greater relative increases in cooperation and earnings. Overall, with punishment, we observe efficiency gains in the Take game, but not in the Give game. This result is linked to the fact that low contributors in their respective groups are targeted for punishment more frequently in the Take game than in the Give game. Key Words: isomorphic, social dilemma, experiment, cooperation, punishment, reciprocal preferences
    JEL: C72 C91 C92 D02 H41
    Date: 2018
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:apl:wpaper:18-15&r=all
  10. By: Pierpaolo Battigalli; Roberto Corrao; Martin Dufwenberg
    Abstract: Psychological game theory (PGT), introduced by Geanakoplos, Pearce & Stacchetti (1989) and signi cantly generalized by Battigalli & Dufwenberg (2009), extends the standard game theoretic framework by letting playersutility at endnodes depend on their interactive beliefs. While it is understood that a host of applications that model and/or test the role of emotional and other psychological forces nd their home in PGT, the framework is abstract and comprises complex mathematical objects, such as playersin nite hierarchies of beliefs. Thus, PGT provides little guidance on how to model speci c belief-dependent motivations and use them in game theoretic analysis. This paper takes steps to fi ll this gap. Some aspects are simplifi ed e.g., which beliefs matter but others are refi ned and brought closer to applications by providing more structure. We start with belief-dependent motivations and show how to embed them in game forms to obtain psychological games. We emphasize the role of time and of the perception of players' intentions. We take advantage of progress made on the foundations of game theory to expand and improve on PGT solution concepts. JEL classi fication: C72; C73; D81; D82; D92Keywords: Psychological game theory; Belief-dependent motivation; Intentions; Time; Rationalizability; Self-confi rming equilibrium; Bayesian sequential equilibrium
    Date: 2019
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:igi:igierp:642&r=all

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