What To Maximize If You Must

Heifetz, Aviad; Shannon, Chris; Spiegel, Yossi

doi:10.2139/ssrn.348500

Cited by 37 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 40 publications

(16 reference statements)

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“…If individuals are strategic agents, then their actions depend on the type of this partner, so information about the partner's type becomes important for determining actions. Accordingly, results from the indirect-evolution literature show that for nonindividualistic preferences to be stable, sufficiently reliable information about the preferences of interacting individuals must be available (29,32) because it is individually advantageous to increase one's partner's payoff only when one is sufficiently certain that the partner will also do the same. In contrast, we assume that in a social interaction individuals act and react to each other in close physical proximity rather than make independent decisions by individual reasoning.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A theory for the evolution of other-regard integrating proximate and ultimate perspectives

Akçay

Cleve

Feldman

et al. 2009

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

119

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Although much previous work describes evolutionary mechanisms that promote or stabilize different social behaviors, we still have little understanding of the factors that drive animal behavior proximately. Here we present a modeling approach to answer this question. Our model rests on motivations to achieve objectives as the proximate determinants of behavior. We develop a two-tiered framework by first modeling the dynamics of a social interaction at the behavioral time scale and then find the evolutionarily stable objectives that result from the outcomes these dynamics produce. We use this framework to ask whether "other-regarding" motivations, which result from a kind of nonselfish objective, can evolve when individuals are engaged in a social interaction that entails a conflict between their material payoffs. We find that, at the evolutionarily stable state, individuals can be other-regarding in that they are motivated to increase their partners' payoff as well as their own. In contrast to previous theories, we find that such motivations can evolve because of their direct effect on fitness and do not require kin selection or a special group structure. We also derive general conditions for the evolutionary stability of other-regarding motivations. Our conditions indicate that other-regarding motivations are more likely to evolve when social interactions and behavioral objectives are both synergistic.A nimal behavior is determined both by proximate mechanisms that dictate an animal's actions in real time and by evolutionary forces that shape these proximate mechanisms. Even though the evolutionary dynamics of social behavior have been extensively studied (1-4), proximate mechanisms of behavior and how they interface with evolutionary forces remain poorly understood (4). In recent years, some models have integrated a proximate mechanism with an evolutionary analysis (5, 6). Furthermore, an explicitly two-tiered approach with potentially cooperative behavioral dynamics embedded in an evolutionary dynamic has been proposed (7) as necessary to understand the evolution of social behavior. We contribute to this literature by developing a unified framework for modeling the evolution of a specific type of behavioral interaction based on a well-defined proximate mechanism.Our proximate mechanism is based on the notion that animals are motivated to achieve certain objectives. Goal-seeking behavior has been a recurring theme in animal behavior and has been an integral part of earlier ethological thinking (e.g. 8, 9). However, this idea lost its prominence after the emergence of modern behavioral ecology, which focuses mainly on the fitness consequences of behavior (see, for example, page 6 of ref. 10). In addition, proximate models of behavior based on goal-seeking have focused mostly on nonsocial behaviors such as foraging (9) and have rarely considered social interactions. Here, we study goal-seeking behavior in the context of a social interaction by developing a model of a pair of interacting animals whose motivations ...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A theory for the evolution of other-regard integrating proximate and ultimate perspectives

Akçay

Cleve

Feldman

et al. 2009

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

119

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…One bothering restriction of our evolutionary analysis is the symmetry of the true probabilities of the twelve possible cost constellations, 17 resembling the usual a priori-symmetry in evolutionary 16 Recently, Heifetz, Shannon, and Spiegel (2004) have shown that the evolutionary emergence of dispositions is generic and that dispositions may remain evolutionarily viable even when the players' preferences are only imperfectly observed. Together with Theorem 11 in Güth and Peleg (2001), this illustrates that the rational expectation hypothesis denies any possibility to signal own or detect others' beliefs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Asymmetric information without common priors: an indirect evolutionary analysis of quantity competition

Güth¹,

Erviti

Ziegelmeyer³

2010

J Evol Econ

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The common prior assumption justifies private beliefs as posterior probabilities when updating a common prior based on individual information. Common priors are pervasive in most economic models of incomplete information and oligopoly models with asymmetrically informed firms. We dispose of the common prior assumption for a homogeneous oligopoly market with uncertain costs and firms entertaining arbitrary priors about other firms' cost-type to analyze which priors will be evolutionarily stable when truly expected profit measures (reproductive) success. When firms believe that all other firms entertain the same beliefs Nature's priors are not the only evolutionarily stable priors. In a second model allowing for asymmetric priors Nature's priors are not even evolutionarily stable.

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“…Relations with the existing literature Several papers have studied the evolution of preferences using the so-called "indirect evolutionary approach" (see, e.g., Güth & Yaari 1992;Ok & Vega-Redondo 2001;Sethi & Somanathan 2001;Dekel et al 2007;Heifetz et al 2007;Herold & Kuzmics 2009). These papers consider agents that are endowed with subjective preferences that may differ from the material payoffs.…”

Section: Definition 14mentioning

confidence: 99%

Stable Observable Behavior

Heller

Mohlin

2015

SSRN Journal

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We study stable behavior when players are randomly matched to play a game, and before the game begins each player may observe how his partner behaved in a few interactions in the past. We present a novel modeling approach and we show that strict Nash equilibria are always stable in such environments. We apply the model to study the Prisoner's Dilemma.We show that if players only observe past actions, then defection is the unique stable outcome. However, if players are able to observe past action profiles, then cooperation is also stable. Finally, we present extensions that study endogenous observation probabilities and the evolution of preferences.

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What To Maximize If You Must

Cited by 37 publications

References 40 publications

A theory for the evolution of other-regard integrating proximate and ultimate perspectives

A theory for the evolution of other-regard integrating proximate and ultimate perspectives

Asymmetric information without common priors: an indirect evolutionary analysis of quantity competition

Stable Observable Behavior

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