Epictetusian rationality and evolutionary stability

Gregory Ponthiere

Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 2024, vol. 34, issue 3, No 4, 647-673

Abstract: Abstract An economic interpretation of Epictetus’s precept of ‘Taking away aversion from all things not in our power’ consists of extending the symmetric factor of the preference relation beyond its boundaries under non-ethical preferences, so as to yield indifference between outcomes differing only on things outside one’s control. This paper examines the evolutionary dynamics of a population composed of Nash agents and Epictetusian agents matched randomly and interacting in the prisoner’s dilemma game. It is shown that when the evolutionary dynamics is driven by material pay-offs, the Nash type is an ESS under perfect random matching, whereas either the Nash or the Epictetusian type can be an ESS under imperfect random matching. However, when selection is driven by utility pay-offs, the Nash type can never be an ESS, and the Epictetusian type is an ESS if the matching process exhibits a sufficiently high degree of assortativity.

Keywords: Ethical preferences; Evolutionary stability; Cooperation; Prisoner’s dilemma; Epictetus; C73; C62; D60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00191-024-00864-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Epictetusian Rationality and Evolutionary Stability (2023)
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:spr:joevec:v:34:y:2024:i:3:d:10.1007_s00191-024-00864-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/191/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00191-024-00864-8

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Evolutionary Economics is currently edited by Uwe Cantner, Elias Dinopoulos, Horst Hanusch and Luigi Orsenigo

More articles in Journal of Evolutionary Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().