IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/spschp/978-3-540-85436-4_8.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Games, Groups, Norms, and Societies

In: Games, Groups, and the Global Good

Author

Listed:
  • Simon Levin

    (Princeton University)

Abstract

The origin and evolution of social norms, social institutions (including religions), and moral systems involve an interplay among processes played out on diverse scales of space, time, and complexity. Such norms, social institutions and systems (collectively referred to here as institutions) emerge from the collective actions of individuals, and feed back to influence those behaviors, but on much faster time scales than the institutions themselves change. In evolutionary biology, this is an example of what Raven (1980) termed “diffuse coevolution,” in which an evolutionary response is not to a single agent (tight coevolution), but rather is a diffuse response to a collection of agents (or species). Dealing with such multiple dimensions requires a new kind of game theory, not only multi-player but also multi-dimensional in other ways. Group formation and the resultant collective actions may lead to diffuse benefits for group members, but are sustained by individual decisions regarding costs and benefits within a social context. To sustain individual behaviors in the collective good, groups and societies develop explicit and implicit reward and punishment schemes, including moral systems. Understanding the interplay among these various players, operating on diverse scales, will require extension of game theoretical concepts to address dynamics on multiple scales, including analysis of meta-games, in which evolved strategies are diffuse responses to collections of situations.

Suggested Citation

  • Simon Levin, 2009. "Games, Groups, Norms, and Societies," Springer Series in Game Theory, in: Simon A. Levin (ed.), Games, Groups, and the Global Good, chapter 8, pages 143-153, Springer.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:spschp:978-3-540-85436-4_8
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-85436-4_8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:spschp:978-3-540-85436-4_8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.