Dynamics of Opinions and Cultural Traits on Endogenous Networks
Final Report Abstract
This project was carried out at Bocconi University in Milan in cooperation with Fabrizio Panebianco. The results are published in Hellmann and Panebianco (2018) which is the first attempt to build a cultural transmission framework in which the socialization network is endogenous and shaped by parents. This enables us to micro-found the emergence of positive and negative role models as functions of original network structure and distribution of cultural traits in the population. In this framework, we show that cultural traits converge to a single cultural trait such that a melting pot society emerges in the long-run. Novel to the literature on dynamics of continuous cultural traits on networks is that we are able to characterize the long run trait. We find that families who have a high degree of imperfect empathy and a central position in the underlying network, have strong influences on the long-run cultural trait. A high degree of imperfect empathy simply means that the preferences of these families are such that their children's adopted traits are very important to them inducing them to exert a lot of effort to bias the network. When a dynasty is very central in the underlying network, then although this network is altered in each period, the cultural trait propagates through the network more easily. We further find that convergence is slowed down by parents efforts to bias the network, implying that convergence is slower the larger the degree of imperfect empathy. So while we get long-run convergence to a melting pot society, we may explain the empirically observed phenomenon of persistence of cultural traits by very slow convergence.
Publications
- (2017). International environmental agreements for local and global pollution. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 81:38 – 58
Günther, M. and Hellmann, T.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2016.09.001)
