Fairness and signalling in bargaining games

Mihaela Popa-Wyatt, Roland Mühlenbernd, Jeremy Leonard Wyatt and O’Connor, Cailin

Economics and Philosophy, 2026, vol. 42, issue 1, 133-153

Abstract: Cultural evolutionary models of bargaining can elucidate issues related to fairness and justice, and especially how fair and unfair conventions and norms might arise in human societies. One line of this research shows how the presence of social categories in such models creates inequitable equilibria that are not possible in models without social categories. This is taken to help explain why in human groups with social categories, inequity is the rule rather than the exception. But in previous models, it is typically assumed that these categories are rigid – in the sense that they cannot be altered, and easily observable – in the sense that all agents can identify each others’ category membership. In reality, social categories are not always so tidy. We introduce evolutionary models where the tags connected with social categories can be flexible, variable, or difficult to observe, i.e. where these tags can carry different amounts of information about group membership. We show how alterations to these tags can undermine the stability of unfair conventions. We argue that these results can inform projects intended to ameliorate inequity, especially projects that seek to alter the properties of tags by promoting experimentation, imitation, and play with identity markers.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:ecnphi:v:42:y:2026:i:1:p:133-153_7

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economics and Philosophy from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().