Kinship, Incentives, and Evolution

Alger, Ingela; Weibull, Jörgen W.

doi:10.1257/aer.100.4.1725

Cited by 129 publications

(87 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Existing literature shows that poor households often allocate resources towards unproductive activities for strategic reasons. These include defending property (Field, 2007;Goldstein and Udry, 2008), hiding income (Anderson and Baland, 2002;Jakiela and Ozier, 2015), free-riding on others' efforts (Alger and Weibull, 2010), and concealing assets (Ashraf, 2009). These incentives are particularly strong in West African households like those in our data, where income pooling is incomplete (Duflo and Udry, 2004).…”

Section: Conceptual Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 80%

Intra-household labor allocation in colonial Nigeria

Arthi

Fenske

2016

Explorations in Economic History

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Abstract. We use a year-long panel of time-use data from colonial Nigeria to show that labor complementarities and strategic concerns shaped the time-use decisions of African households. Using quantitative and ethnographic approaches, we show that health shocks imposed time costs that followed the gender division of labor. The labor of others did not automatically compensate for this. Whether individuals could respond by recruiting substitutes depended on social standing, urgency of work, and type of illness. Labor was coordinated between spouses. Child labor was coordinated with parental work, aided childcare, and allowed children to build skills and resources.

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Section: Conceptual Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 80%

Intra-household labor allocation in colonial Nigeria

Arthi

Fenske

2016

Explorations in Economic History

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“…As discussed by Landes (1998), "the same value thwarted by "bad government" at home can find opportunity else where, as in the case of China." 3 This paper closely follows the works on indirect evolutionary approach including Güth and Yaari (1992), Güth (1995), Bester and Güth (1998), McNamara, Gasson and Houston (1999), Sethi and Somanathan (2001), Ok and Vega-Redondo (2001), Van Veelen (2006), Dekel, Ely and Yilankaya (2007), Spiegel (2007a, 2007b), Kuran and Sandholm (2008), Akçay et al (2009), Alger (2010) and Alger and Weibull (2010, 2013.…”

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confidence: 89%

Political Institutions and Preference Evolution

2016

SSRN Journal

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This paper argues that political institutions play an important role in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of preferences. We consider a population with two preference groups. A political institution provides the platform and a set of rules for the two groups to battle over the relative representativeness of their preference traits for the high positions in the social hierarchy. This political process affects the economic outcomes of the two groups, subsequently the intergenerational transmission of preferences. We study how conducive different political institutions are to spreading preference traits that induce better economic outcomes. We find that any preference trait can be prevalent under "exclusive" political institutions. Therefore, a society can be trapped in a state in which preference traits associated with unfavorable economic outcomes persist. On the other hand, preference evolution under "inclusive" political institutions has stronger selection power and only the preference traits that result in the largest comparative advantage in holding a high position can be prevalent.

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“…Alger and Weibull (2010), for example, study the evolution of altruism with the traditional definition of fitness as physical survival. Heifetz et al (2007) offer a game-theoretic methodology with general ad-hoc fitness functions; their key assumption is that individuals may maximize a combination of the fitness function and an "individual disposition," with the latter being subject to evolutionary drift.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nothing else matters: Evolution of preference for social prestige

Zakharenko

2016

Mathematical Social Sciences

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This paper seeks answers to two questions. First, if a greater social activity of an individual enhances oblique (i.e. to non-relatives) transmission of her cultural traits at the expense of vertical (i.e. to children) transmission as well as family size, which behavior is optimal from cultural evolution standpoint? I formalize a general model that characterizes evolutionarily stable behaviors. The proposed model replicates the theory of Newson et al. (2007) that fertility decline is caused by increasing role of oblique cultural transmission. Second, if social activity is a rational choice rather than a culturally inherited trait, and if cultural transmission acts on preferences rather than behaviors, which preferences survive the process of cultural evolution? I arrive at a very simple yet powerful result: under mild assumptions on model structure, only preferences which emphasize exclusively the concern for social prestige, i.e. extent to which one's cultural trait has been picked up by others, survive.

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Kinship, Incentives, and Evolution

Cited by 129 publications

References 51 publications

Intra-household labor allocation in colonial Nigeria

Intra-household labor allocation in colonial Nigeria

Political Institutions and Preference Evolution

Nothing else matters: Evolution of preference for social prestige

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