COMMUNICATION, REPEATED GAMES AND THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL NORMS
COMMUNICATION, REPEATED GAMES AND THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL NORMS

Summary/Abstract: For a long time, economists, political theorists and sociologists have sought to explain the emergence of social norms, those principles that guide individual and community behavior. However, no unified opinion exists in these disciplines. As an example, some economists often use supergame equilibria to characterize social norms because they allow players to form strategies for punishing deviations and these promote community behavior. A second group of economists used Nash’s bargaining solution to argue that the equal division of output is a “social norm” for sharecropping situations (Bell and Zusman, 1976). Finally, in the same field, a third group included equilibrium through communication (Myerson, 1982) and coalition proof Nash equilibrium (DeMarzo, 1992) in order to characterize social norms. The same heterogeneity is registered in the field of sociology. Political theorists tried to emphasize the emergence of social norms combining the contractualist tradition coming from Rousseau, Locke, and Hobbes with rational choice and law and economics approaches. Congruently, Axelrod (1981) advanced the ides that a particular strategy of those actors involved in individual or collective games leads to the emergence, respect and institutionalization of norms.

• Details
• Contents