Cooperation as a Transmitted Cultural Trait
Alberto Bisin,
Giorgio Topa and
Thierry Verdier
Rationality and Society, 2004, vol. 16, issue 4, 477-507
Abstract:
In this paper, we study an endogenous cultural selection mechanism for cooperative behavior in a setting where agents are randomly matched in a one-shot interaction Prisoner’s Dilemma, and may or may not have complete information about their opponent’s preferences. We focus on an endogenous socialization mechanism in which parents spend costly effort to transmit directly their trait to their offspring, taking into account the impact of (oblique) societal pressures on cultural transmission. For various ranges of parameter values, this mechanism generates a polymorphic population with a long-run presence of cooperative agents, even where replicator and indirect evolutionary mechanisms would bring about a monomorphic population with non-cooperation. Further, under some circumstances, the long-run fraction of cooperative agents is shown to be larger under incomplete than complete information.
Keywords: cooperation; cultural transmission; endogenous preferences; evolutionary selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (70)
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1043463104046695 (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:sae:ratsoc:v:16:y:2004:i:4:p:477-507
DOI: 10.1177/1043463104046695
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Rationality and Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().