Strategic Choice of Preferences: the Persona Model
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David Wolpert
Recent work in several fields has established that humans can adopt binding “behavioral” preferences and convincingly signal those preferences to other humans, either via their behavior or via their body language / tone of voice. In this paper, we model the strategic implications of this ability. Our thesis is that through a person's lifetime they (perhaps subconsciously) learn what such signaled, binding behavioral preferences result in the highest value of their actual preferences, given the resultant behavior of other players. We argue that this “persona” model may explain why many interpersonal preferences have the particular form they do. As an illustration, we use the persona model to explain cooperation in non-repeated versions of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). We also provide quantitative predictions to distinguish this explanation of cooperation from simply assuming people have actual preferences biased towards cooperation. In particular, we show that the persona model predicts a “crowding out” phenomenon in the PD, in which introducing incentives to cooperate causes players to stop cooperating instead. We also use the persona model to predict a tradeoff between the robustness of cooperation in the PD and the benefit of that cooperation.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Advances Article
- Strategy-Proof Compromises
- Make-or-Buy Decisions and the Manipulability of Performance Measures
- Optimal Mechanism for Selling Two Goods
- A Property of Solutions to Linear Monopoly Problems
- Interactive Epistemology and Solution Concepts for Games with Asymmetric Information
- No-Trade in the Laboratory
- Symmetry or Dynamic Consistency?
- Contributions Article
- When Two-Part Tariffs are Not Enough: Mixing with Nonlinear Pricing
- Sellers Like Clusters
- Network Architecture and the Left-Right Spectrum
- Information, Authority, and Corporate Hierarchies
- The Benefit of Mixing Private Noise into Public Information in Beauty Contest Games
- Intertemporal Bounded Rationality as Consideration Sets with Contraction Consistency
- The Survival Assumption in Intertemporal Economies
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- Multiproduct Duopoly with Vertical Differentiation
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- On the Existence and Social Optimality of Equilibria in a Hotelling Game with Uncertain Demand and Linear-Quadratic Costs
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