Cultural Evolution in a Population of Heterogeneous Agents

Gábor Fáth () and Miklos Sarvary ()
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Gábor Fáth: Research Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics
Miklos Sarvary: INSEAD - Boulevard de Constance

A chapter in The Complex Networks of Economic Interactions, 2006, pp 193-205 from Springer

Abstract: Summary A general theory of cultural evolution is formulated using a cognitive dimension reduction scheme. Rational but cognitively limited agents iteratively invent and redefine abstract concepts in order to best represent their natural and social environment. These concepts are used for decision making and determine the agents’ overall behavior. The collection of concepts an agent uses constitutes his/her cultural profile. As the importance of social interactions increase and/or agents become more intelligent we find a series of dynamical phase transitions by which the coherence of concepts advances in the society. Our model explains the so-called “cultural explosion” in human evolution 50,000 years ago as a spontaneous ordering phenomenon of the individual mental representations.

Keywords: Nash Equilibrium; Mental Representation; Cultural Evolution; Representation Error; Heterogeneous Agent (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:lnechp:978-3-540-28727-8_13

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DOI: 10.1007/3-540-28727-2_13

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