Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Chapter 58 Emergent Conventions in Evolutionary Games

2008; Elsevier BV; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s1574-0722(07)00058-3

1574-0722

John B. Van Huyck,

Game Theory and Applications

Understanding the origin of convention requires us to understand how people learn mutually consistent behavior, which then becomes customary and expected. This chapter reports experimental results on the emergence of conventions in evolutionary games. In an evolutionary game, a stage game is played repeatedly by random subsets of the cohort. Laboratory communities or cohorts are usually chosen to be large enough to make repeated game strategies unrewarding, but small enough to allow a convention to emerge quickly. A cohort is likely to bring customary and expected behavior into the laboratory that is not mutually consistent given the incentives of the experiment. Widely discussed examples are the salience of efficiency in games with inefficient dominant strategies and the salience of equal division in games with unequal bargaining power.