This is a paper on the creation and evolution of conventions of behavior in "inter-generational games". In these games a sequence of nonoverlapping "generations" of players play a stage game for a finite number of periods and are then replaced by other agents who continue the game in their role for an identical length of time. Players in generation t are allowed to see the history of the game played by all (or some subset) of the generations who played it before them and can communicate with their successors in generation t+1 and advise them on how they should behave. What we find is that word-of-mouth social learning (in the form of advice from parents to children) can be a strong force in the creation of social conventions, far stronger than the type of learning subjects seem capable of doing simply by learning the lessons of history without the guidance offered by such advice.
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Paper provided by C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, New York University in its series Working Papers with number
00-01.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Matthew Jackson & Ehud Kalai, 1995.
"Social Learning in Recurring Games,"
Discussion Papers
1138, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
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