Social Conformity in Games with Many Players
01.01.2003
Myrna Wooders, Reinhard Selten, Edward Cartwright
Climate Change and Sustainable Development
Carlo Carraro
In the literature of psychology and economics it is frequently observed that individuals tend to imitate similar individuals. A fundamental question is whether the outcome of such imitation can be consistent with self-interested behaviour. We propose that this consistency requires the existence of a Nash equilibrium that induces a partition of the player set into relatively few groups of similar individuals playing the same or similar strategies. In this paper we define and characterise a family of games admitting existence of approximated Nash equilibria in pure strategies that induce partition of the player sets with the desired properties. We also introduce the Conley-Wooders concept of ‘crowding types’ into our description 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 this assumption of ‘within crowding type anonymity’ and a ‘convexity of taste-types’ assumption we show that the number of groups can be uniformly bounded.