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Social Choice and Welfare

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03.09.2021 | Original Paper

Evolutionary stability of preferences: altruism, selfishness, and envy

verfasst von: Sung-Hoon Park, Jeong-Yoo Kim

Erschienen in: Social Choice and Welfare | Ausgabe 2/2022

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Abstract

This paper examines evolutionary stability of preferences in games with strategic complements or substitutes following the indirect evolutionary approach. Preferences are classified into three types: altruism, selfishness, and envy. Depending on the nature of a game (one with strategic substitutes or complements), envy or altruism respectively is strictly dominated. Based on this, we show that an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) exists in which selfishness and envy survive together in games with strategic substitutes, whereas no ESS exists in which altruism and selfishness coexist in games with strategic complements.

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Adam Smith observed that human nature leads people to be altruistically concerned about the well-being of others. In this book, he wrote, “However selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”

Nowak and May (1992) showed the long-run survival of altruistic behavior by simulations, Eshel et al. proved it analytically.

Also, see Schaffer (1988) for evolutionary stability in a finite population. He proposed the notion of the generalized evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) that can be applied to the cases of a finite population and showed that the preference satisfying the generalized ESS is envy (spitefulness) in a finite population.

Dekel et al. (2007) considers the evolution of emotions when emotions are observable and when emotions are not observable. However, they do not consider the evolutionary process of observability itself.

It is well known that the continuous-time deterministic replicator dynamics eliminates strategies that are strictly dominated by a pure strategy in the long run, starting from an interior state. Akin (1980) first showed this and Samuelson and Zhang (1992) extends the result under any monotonic dynamics which includes replicator dynamics.

This is proved in Appendix (Lemma 5).

The underlying dynamics behind this is that if the fitness of an altruist is higher due to high p, the population of the altruists will keep growing, until it reaches \(p^* =1\) which is stable.

Under the replicator dynamics, selfish players will prosper more and more, until the whole population consists of selfish players, i.e., \(p^* =0\). In that sense, \(p^* =0\) is stable.

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Titel: Evolutionary stability of preferences: altruism, selfishness, and envy
verfasst von: Sung-Hoon Park
Jeong-Yoo Kim
Publikationsdatum: 03.09.2021
Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Erschienen in: Social Choice and Welfare / Ausgabe 2/2022
Print ISSN: 0176-1714
Elektronische ISSN: 1432-217X
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-021-01361-8

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