A Cognitively Founded Model of the Emergence of Social Conventions

This paper presents a model of the emergence of social conventions that allow a population of agents to co-ordinate their actions on the basis of some observable individual trait. In this paper the co-ordination problem is represented by the Stag-Hunt game, where the players can choose either the socially optimal or the risk-adverse action. While the theory of learning in games commonly assumes that the players can observe only the strategies chosen by their opponents, this paper introduces the additional assumption that the players are characterized by phenotypic traits observable by the other players with whom they interact. The extension of the traditional framework allows to introduce a more sophisticated and cognitively plausible formation model expectations than the ones proposed so far. In particular, this paper proposes a new model of the induction process through which the agents build mental models that take the form of lexicographically structured decision trees.