THE CO-EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION AND COGNITION UNDER ENDOGENOUS POPULATION STRUCTURE
The DEMS Economics Seminar series, jointly with the CISEPS reserch center, are proud to host
Ennio Bilancini
(IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca)
Abstract: We study the co-evolution of cooperation and cognition with an endogenous interaction structure. We consider a model in which in each period agents are randomly matched to play either an anonymous one-shot or a repeated prisoners’ dilemma. However, agents can recognize the actual game they are playing only under deliberation which comes at a cost randomly sampled from a generic distribution. We introduce a set of identical locations and impose that only agents in the same location interact with each other. We show that depending on the actual distribution of deliberation costs the system is characterized by either two or three types of absorbing sets: (i) an intuitive defection set, (ii) dual-process cooperation states, and possibly (iii) dual-process defection states. Moreover, we find that the presence of an endogenous interaction structure enlarges the parameter space in which dual-process cooperation states are stochastically stable and, in particular, we show that if dual-process cooperation states are absorbing then they are also stochastically stable.
The seminar will be in person: DEMS seminar room 2104, Building U7