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Mind & Society

Erschienen in:

01.12.2010

Social norms or social preferences?

verfasst von: Ken Binmore

Erschienen in: Mind & Society | Ausgabe 2/2010

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Abstract

Some behavioral economists argue that the honoring of social norms can be adequately modeled as the optimization of social utility functions in which the welfare of others appears as an explicit argument. This paper suggests that the large experimental claims made for social utility functions are premature at best, and that social norms are better studied as equilibrium selection devices that evolved for use in games that are seldom studied in economics laboratories.

Vorheriger Artikel Sociality and external validity in experimental economics

Nächster Artikel Cooperation in and out of the lab: a comment on Binmore’s paper

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Vernon Smith is the leading example of a large number of experimental economists who do not follow the behavioral line.

I think that Lewis went astray by insisting that conventions must be common knowledge in order to be operational, but this is another story (Binmore 2008).

Neoclassical economists have traditionally avoided the issue by confining their attention to models with only one equilibrium, which explains their lack of interest in fairness. If there is no equilibrium selection problem to solve, why take an interest in an equilibrium selection device like a fairness norm?

There is a dispute about whether human beings are strong or weak reciprocators. Strong reciprocators reciprocate because reciprocation is built into their utility functions—they reciprocate because they like reciprocating. The text applies even with weak reciprocation, in which people reciprocate only for instrumental reasons.

The enforcement here is enforcement by the players themselves as envisaged in the folk theorem, and not external enforcement by the government (National or cross-regional attempts at harambee collections are predictably corrupt).

A dissident note is sounded by Anderson et al. (2010).

I do not know of experiments on the Ultimatum Game in which subjects have experience of more than ten trials, which is not a large number. Cooper and Dutcher (2009) nevertheless find evidence of change in the responders’ behavior over time, but the behavioralists are right that there is not a lot of movement overall.

This question begs the issue of whether subjects in the Ultimatum Game are maximizing anything at all, but we adopt the point of view of an old-fashioned economist here.

All one can say of the vital parameter β when a proposer makes the modal offer of a fifty-fifty split is that β ≥ 0.5.

I think that biological evolution sometimes provides a deep structure that limits what social norms are possible for the human species (Binmore 2005), but it is social or cultural evolution that is responsible for the differences between norms that arise in different cultures or within different contexts in the same culture.

Nash fuzzed the boundary to reduce the set of equilibria to the single point N, which is the Nash bargaining solution of the game. We ended up with a larger set, because the use of a computer meant that the strategy sets were necessarily discrete.

Both E and U are approximate Nash equilibria if amounts of a quarter or less are neglected.

The replicator dynamics is often used to model adjustment processes in games. Nobody thinks that it is anywhere near adequate by itself to predict how real individuals learn, although Roth and Erev 1995 find that perturbed versions are not too bad at tracking average behavior in some subject populations.

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Titel: Social norms or social preferences?
verfasst von: Ken Binmore
Publikationsdatum: 01.12.2010
Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Erschienen in: Mind & Society / Ausgabe 2/2010
Print ISSN: 1593-7879
Elektronische ISSN: 1860-1839
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-010-0073-2

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