Behavioral Conformity in Games with Many Players

Myrna Wooders, Edward Cartwright and Reinhard Selten

No 513, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers from Vanderbilt University Department of Economics

Abstract: In the literature of psychology and economics it is frequently observed that individuals tend to conform in their behavior to the behavior of similar individuals. A fundamental question is whether the outcome of such behavior can be consistent with self-interest. We propose that this consistency requires the existence of a Nash or approximate Nash equilibrium that induces a partition of the player set into relatively few societies, each consisting of similar individuals playing the same or similar strategies. In this paper we introduce a notion of a society and characterize a family of games admitting the existence of such an equilibrium. We also introduce the concept of 'crowding types' into our description of players and distinguish between the crowding type of a player -- those characteristics of a player that have direct effects on others -- and his tastes, taken to directly affect only that player. With the assumptions of 'within crowding type anonymity' and 'linearity of taste-types' we show that the number of groups can be uniformly bounded.

Keywords: Behavioral conformity; noncooperative games; pregames; Nash equilibrium; purification; social norms; behavioral norms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.accessecon.com/pubs/VUECON/vu05-w13.pdf First version, 2005 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Behavioral conformity in games with many players (2006)
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:van:wpaper:0513

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers from Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by John P. Conley ().