Behavioral Conformity in Games with Many Players

Myrna Wooders (), Edward John Cartwright () and Reinhard Selten

No 513, Working Papers from Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University

Abstract: In the literature of psychology and economics it is frequently observed that individuals tend to conform in their behavior to the behavior of similar individuals. A fundamental question is whether the outcome of such behavior can be consistent with self-interest. We propose that this consistency requires the existence of a Nash or approximate Nash equilibrium that induces a partition of the player set into relatively few societies, each consisting of similar individuals playing the same or similar strategies. In this paper we introduce a notion of a society and characterize a family of games admitting the existence of such an equilibrium. We also introduce the concept of 'crowding types' into our description of players and distinguish between the crowding type of a player -- those characteristics of a player that have direct effects on others -- and his tastes, taken to directly affect only that player. With the assumptions of 'within crowding type anonymity' and 'linearity of taste-types' we show that the number of groups can be uniformly bounded.

Keywords: Behavioral conformity; noncooperative games; pregames; Nash equilibrium; purification; social norms; behavioral norms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo and nep-gth
Date: 2005-04
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Econ/wparchive/workpaper/vu05-w13.pdf First version, 2005 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Behavioral conformity in games with many players (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:van:wpaper:0513

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Diana Weymark ().