The Evolutionary Stability of Optimism, Pessimism, and Complete Ignorance

Arbeitspapier

We seek an evolutionary explanation for why in some situations humans maintain either optimistic or pessimistic attitudes towards uncertainty and are ignorant to relevant aspects of their environment. Players in strategic games face Knightian uncertainty about opponents' actions and maximize individually their Choquet expected utility with respect to neo-additive capacities (Chateauneuf, Eichberger, and Grant, 2007) allowing for both an optimistic or pessimistic attitude towards uncertainty as well as ignorance to strategic dependencies. An optimist (resp. pessimist) overweights good (resp. bad) outcomes. A complete ignorant never reacts to opponents' changes of actions. We focus on sub- and supermodular aggregative games and provide monotone comparative statics w.r.t. optimism/pessimism. With qualifications we show that in finite populations optimistic (resp. pessimistic) complete ignorance is evolutionary stable and yields a strategic advantage in submodular (resp. supermodular) games with aggregate externalities. Moreover, this evolutionary stable preference leads to Walrasian behavior in these classes of games.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: Working Paper ; No. 334

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Noncooperative Games ; Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games; Repeated Games ; Microeconomic Behavior: Underlying Principles ; Market Structure, Pricing, and Design: Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection ; Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty ; Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
• Thema: ambiguity ; Knightian uncertainty ; Choquet expected utility ; neo-additive capacity ; Hurwicz criterion ; Maximin ; Minimax ; supermodularity ; aggregative games ; monotone comparative statics ; playing the field ; evolution of preferences

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Schipper, Burkhard
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): University of California, Department of Economics
• (wo): Davis, CA
• (wann): 2019

Weitere Informationen

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/244602
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:42 MEZ