Christophe will give a talk for a seminar at the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the Toulouse School of Economics. Here is the title and abstract:
___Schelling Salience and the Cultural Transmission of Coordination Strategies___
I plan to present ideas for a grant application focused on investigating how Schelling salience shape the cultural evolution of coordination strategies, and thus78uiy conventions. The core of this proposal involves maintaining and enriching a smartphone application called "Coordy," designed to collect empirical data on the transmission and cultural evolution of coordination strategies.
While it is well established that strategy selection in coordination games is significantly influenced by psychological factors determining how people identify focal points, current models of evolutionary game theory cannot integrate these insights without substantive empirical data. In particular, what are the psychological factors that either keep people into a lock in (an equilibrium that is suboptimal but is selected because of precedence) or easily bring them out?
I will present some experiments illustrating the potential value of psychological research on the processes through which people identify focal points, and how these experiments can be followed up with ’transmission chains’ experiments of coordination strategies.
The proposed research consist in using the Coordy app to document how coordination strategies are culturally transmitted, (hopefully) providing valuable insights into the interplay between, on the one hand, psychological mechanisms for identifying focal points and, on the other hand, the evolutionary dynamics of coordination and the cultural evolution of conventions.