Regensburg 2019 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 9: Economic Models

SOE 9.1: Talk

Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 09:30–10:00, H17

How exclusive competition promotes discrimination — •Gorm Gruner Jensen and Stefan Bornholdt — Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Bremen

Some game theoretical models have been proposed to illustrate how social discrimination could be the consequence of different groups getting stuck in different Nash equilibria due to self-perpetuating collective reputation [1,2]. While these models show that multiple equilibria are possible, they don’t describe any interactions between the reputations of different groups, and it is therefore left as an open question how their historic events lead to different equilibria in the first place. Here we explore a variation of the theory of collective reputation, in which agents are not evaluated on whether their reputation is good, but rather whether it is better than that of their peers. The introduction of this element of exclusive competition is inspired by recent results from evolutionary game theory suggesting that discrimination is more likely to emerge through spontaneous symmetry-breaking in highly competitive environments [3].

[1] J. Tirole, The Review of Economic Studies 63, 1 (1996). URL https://doi.org/10.2307/2298112

[2] J. Levin, The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics 9 (2009), https://doi.org/10.2202/1935-1704.1548

[3] G.G. Jensen, S. Bornholdt, Social evolution of structural discrimination, arXiv:1703.06311