Cultural Transmission with Incomplete Information: Parental Perceived Efficacy and Group Misrepresentation

Sebastiano Della Lena and Fabrizio Panebianco ()
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Fabrizio Panebianco: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

No def079, DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE)

Abstract: This paper introduces incomplete information in the standard model of cultural transmission (Bisin and Verdier, 2001). We allow parents to ignore own group size and the efficiency of their cultural transmission technology, while receiving a feedback from their children. Using the selfcon_rming equilibrium concept, parents may end up to sustain, and be confirmed about, wrong conjectures. We show that in equilibrium optimal socialization efforts display cultural complementarity with respect to own population share, while the standard substitution result holds with respect their own conjectured population shares. Considering the population dynamics, if conjectures about population shares are shaped by cultural leaders who want to maximize the presence of own traits in the next period, then conjectures are characterized by negative biases. Our main finding is that, depending on the magnitude of the bias, the dynamics can display stable or unstable polymorphic equilibria, or just a stable homomorphic equilibrium, potentially reverting standard predictions

Keywords: Cultural Transmission; Incomplete Information; Selfcon rming Equilibrium; Group Under-Representation; Parental Perceived Ecacy; Cultural leaders. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D10 D80 J10 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35
Date: 2019-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-mic and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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