| Abstract: | Human behavior and collective actions are strongly affected by social institutions. A question of great theoretical and practical importance is how successful social institutions get established and spread across groups and societies. Here, using institutionalized punishment in small-scale societies as an example, we contrast two prominent mechanisms - selective imitation and self-interested design - with respect to their ability to converge to cooperative social institutions. While selective imitation has received a great deal of attention in studies of social and cultural evolution, the theoretical toolbox for studying self-interested design is limited. Recently Perry, Shrestha, Vose, and Gavrilets (2018) expanded this toolbox by introducing a novel approach, which they called foresight, generalizing standard myopic best response for the case of individuals with a bounded ability to anticipate actions of their group-mates and care about future payoffs. Here we apply this approach to two general types of collective action – “us vs. nature” and “us vs. them” games. We consider groups composed by a number of regular members producing collective good and a leader monitoring and punishing free-riders. Our results show that foresight increases leaders' willingness to punish free-riders. This, in turn, leads to increased production and the emergence of an effective institution for collective action. We also observed that largely similar outcomes can be achieved by selective imitation, as argued earlier. Selective imitation by leaders (i.e. cultural group selection) outperforms self-interested design if leaders strongly discount the future. Foresight and selective imitation can interact synergistically leading to a faster convergence to an equilibrium. Our approach is applicable to many other types of social institutions and collective action. |
