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Social Deliberation: Nash, Bayes, and the Partial Vindication of Gabriele Tarde

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2012

J. McKenzie Alexander
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Abstract

At the very end of the 19th century, Gabriele Tarde wrote that all society was a product of imitation and innovation. This view regarding the development of society has, to a large extent, fallen out of favour, and especially so in those areas where the rational actor model looms large. I argue that this is unfortunate, as models of imitative learning, in some cases, agree better with what people actually do than more sophisticated models of learning. In this paper, I contrast the behaviour of imitative learning with two more sophisticated learning rules (one based on Bayesian updating, the other based on the Nash-Brown-von Neumann dynamics) in the context of social deliberation problems. I show for two social deliberation problems, the Centipede game and a simple Lewis sender-receiver game, that imitative learning provides better agreement with what people actually do, thus partially vindicating Tarde.

Type
Research Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 164 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

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