The Evolution of Conventions

Conventions evolve through three channels:

•  Vertical transmission (from parents and family to children)
• Horizontal transmission (from peers, “conformity”)
• Learning (imitate the best action)

1. Vertical Transmission

2. Horizontal Transmission

3. Learning: the prob of choosing a certain strategy observed in the population being a monotonically increasing function of the payoff realized by that strategy

There should also be a random component representing maverick behavior and bounded rationality, etc. This random component serves as mutation in the evolutionary process and may help overcome local optimality

I plan to investigate cultural evolution by putting these four components together using agent-based modeling. 

Currently I am thinking of a child-bearing related question.

As we can observe, in many Asian countries, parents (even grandparents!) take care of the children even after they become adults, and then the children provide the parents when they become old. We often hear Chinese say that, “Happiness comes with more offspring.” 

Why do Chinese spend so much time, energy and resources on their children? Why do Asians value family much more than the Europeans? These are, of course, convoluted questions that involve many contributing factors. My conjecture is that, children in Asian countries serve as substitute of financial market.  When people are young and strong, they can earn a large amount wealth all of which they cannot consume. Without a mature financial market, they cannot “invest” or “save” the wealth safely either. Hence, even though they may not realize, Chinese “invest” on child-bearing to protect against the future.

I built a toy model using the idea of overlapping generation to show that child-bearing helps to achieve Pareto optimality just as a financial market does. With the four components interacting with each other, the problem is hard to solve analytically. So I want to use the computational model to simulate the evolution and see whether interesting behaviors that are consistent with empirical regularities emerge from the system.  The simulation can also help to design lab experiment to investigate the problem of cultural evolution.