A Game-Theoretical Approach to the Formation of Ethical Norms

Kazuo Machino

No 157, Discussion paper series. A from Graduate School of Economics and Business Administration, Hokkaido University

Abstract: This essay showｓ the formation of the ethical-norms analytically by modeling them with a Bayesian game played by bounded-rational players. They are bounded-rational in the sense that they have limited memory. The players’ limited memory makes them forget other choices they had and think their relatively successful choice a convention. Deviation from it causes payoff decrease, thus, creates an incentive to penalize the deviator. Finally, reinforcement mechanism of repeating penalty makes the socially beneficial but personally costly convention an ethical norm.

Pages: 13 pages
Date: 2005-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/2115/8475 (text/html)
https://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream ... 157%28Machino%29.pdf (application/pdf)

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:hok:dpaper:157

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion paper series. A from Graduate School of Economics and Business Administration, Hokkaido University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hokkaido University Library ().