0000000000887014
AUTHOR
Fabrizio Panebianco
The dynamics of personal norms and the determinants of cultural homogeneity
This article studies the emergence of cultural homogeneity in personal norms when the behavior of heterogeneous individuals is driven both by economic incentives and by personal norms. Agents participate in a team production game by choosing their level of costly effort. Norms evolve along the life cycle of the individuals according to two psychological forces: cognitive dissonance or consistency and informational conformity. The model sheds light on how primitive economic and behavioral parameters such as the distribution of skills, the income distribution, and the levels of materialism, conformism, and consistency in the group determine the long-run culture and its degree of cultural homo…
The erosion of personal norms and cognitive dissonance
ABSTRACTIn this article, we study how personal norms and behaviour interact and evolve when agents try to reduce cognitive dissonance, and how this dynamic relates to Nash equilibrium. We find that in long run, agents play, and norms prescribe, Nash equilibrium in material payoffs (in the absence of norms). Our model captures two main facts: (i) norms erode along the play of the game; (ii) the erosion of norms depends on the set of possible economic choices, so that the policy maker can potentially influence them.
Culture and team production
Abstract This paper addresses theoretically the question whether culture has an effect on economic performance in team production, and what would be an optimal team culture. The members of a team are guided both by economic incentives and by personal norms, weighed according to their prevailing level of materialism. We assume that personal norms evolve following a dynamic driven by a combination of psychological mechanisms such as consistency and conformism. The different vectors of materialism, consistency and conformism shared by the group result in a continuum of cultures characterized by different combinations of individualism and collectivism. Team culture turns out to be a fundamental…