History, Expectations, and Leadership in the Evolution of Social Norms
研究两期世代交替中合作规范的演变，发现历史主导落后社会，而前瞻社会出现反转模式，且偶尔的突出个体能通过影响预期扭转低合作规范。
We study the evolution of a social norm of “cooperation” in a dynamic environment. Each agent lives for two periods and interacts with agents from the previous and next generations via a coordination game. Social norms emerge as patterns of behaviour that are stable in part due to agents' interpretations of private information about the past, influenced by occasional commonly observed past behaviours. For sufficiently backward-looking societies, history completely drives equilibrium play, leading to a social norm of high or low cooperation. In more forward-looking societies, there is a pattern of “reversion” whereby play starting with high (low) cooperation reverts towards lower (higher) cooperation. The impact of history can be countered by occasional “prominent” agents, whose actions are visible by all future agents and who can leverage their greater visibility to influence expectations of future agents and overturn social norms of low cooperation.