What to maximize if you must

doi:10.1016/j.jet.2005.05.013

Journal of Economic Theory

Volume 133, Issue 1, March 2007, Pages 31-57

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jet.2005.05.013 Get rights and content

Abstract

The assumption that decision makers choose actions to maximize their preferences is a central tenet in economics, often justified formally or informally by appealing to evolutionary arguments. In contrast, we show that in almost every game and for almost every family of distortions of a player's actual payoffs, some degree of this distortion is beneficial to the player, and will not be driven out by any evolutionary process involving payoff-monotonic selection dynamics. Consequently, under any such selection dynamics the population will not converge to payoff-maximizing behavior. We also show that payoff-maximizing behavior need not prevail when preferences are imperfectly observed.

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Citation Excerpt :
It also provides a rationale for such a divergence. More generally, this paper joins the theoretical literature that investigates how evolutionary forces may have shaped human preferences (Frank, 1987; Güth and Yaari, 1992; Bergstrom, 1996; Robson, 2001; Robson, 2002; Dekel et al., 2007; Heifetz et al., 2007; Rayo and Becker, 2007, and Wu, 2020). In particular, it expands the set of preferences that have been examined, previous studies having analyzed the impact of shock distributions on the discrepancy between decision and experienced utility (Robson and Samuelson, 2011); of the harshness of the environment on intra-family altruism (Alger and Weibull, 2010); of the advent of agriculture on the willingness to defend private property (Bowles and Choi, 2019); of migratory patterns on preferences governing behavior in social interactions (Alger et al., 2020a).
Since a man’s reproductive success depends on his ability to outcompete other men, male competitiveness may be expected to have been exposed to strong selective pressure throughout human history. Accordingly, the relatively low level of physical violence observed between men has been viewed as a puzzle. What could have limited the eagerness of men to out-compete each other? I study the evolution of male competitiveness in a model where men compete for both reproductive and productive resources. I show that high levels of male competitiveness are then consistent with evolution by natural selection if (a) the ecology is generous enough for men to supply little or no food to their children, (b) competing is not too costly in terms of productive resources, and (c) relatedness among males is low enough. While the main analysis takes women to passively accept the husband that emerges from the male-male competition, the results are qualitatively robust to allowing for female mate choice following the male-male competition game. Possible implications for our understanding of the evolution of marriage systems are discussed.

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What to maximize if you must

Abstract

J. Finan. Markets

J. Econ. Behav. Organ.

J. Econ. Theory

Europ. J. Polit. Econ.

Games Econ. Behav.

Games Econ. Behav.

Games Econ. Behav.

J. Econ. Theory

J. Econ. Theory

J. Econ. Theory

J. Econ. Theory

J. Econ. Theory

J. Econ. Behav. Organ.

J. Econ. Theory

J. Econ. Theory

Uncertainty, evolution and economic theory

J. Polit. Economy

Genericity with infinitely many parameters

Advances Theoretical Econ.

Is altruism evolutionary stable?

J. Econ. Behav. Organ.

Inefficiency of Nash equilibria

Mathematics Operations Res.