Many charities report donations using categories. We question whether such category reporting increases donations in a signalling game where a donor is either generous or not generous. Conditions are derived under which category reporting will increase giving or decrease giving. Category...

In this paper we analyse the effect that naïve agents (those who take behavior at 'face value') have on the nature of social norms. After reviewing the use of signalling models to model conformity, we argue in favour of modelling naïve inferences in tandem with standard Bayes rational...

An individual's contribution to a public good may be seen by others as a signal of attributes such as generosity or wealth. An individual may, therefore, choose their contribution so as to send an appropriate signal to others. In this paper we question how the inferences made by others will...

Institutions for co-financing agreements often exist to encourage public good investment. Can such frameworks deliver maximal investment when agents are motivated by reciprocity? We demonstrate that indeed they can, but not in the way one might expect. If maximal investment is impossible in the...

Reciprocity can be a powerful motivation for human behaviour. Scholars argue that it is relevant in the context of private provision of public goods. We examine whether reciprocity can resolve the associated coordination problem. The interaction of reciprocity with cost-sharing is critical....

We illustrate one way in which a population of boundedly rational individuals can learn to play an approximate Nash equilibrium. Players are assumed to make strategy choices using a combination of imitation and innovation. We begin by looking at an imitation dynamic and provide conditions under...

In has been frequently observed, in both economics and psychology, that individuals tend to conform to the choices of other individuals with whom thy identify. Can such conformity be consistent with self-interested behaviour? To address this question we use the framework of games with incomplete...

In the literature of psychology and economics it is frequently observed that individuals tend to imitate similar individuals. A fundamental question is whether the outcome of such imitation can be consistent with self-interested behaviour. We propose that this consistency requires the existence...

Motivated by issues of imitation, learning and evolution, we introduce a framework of non-co-operative games, allowing both countable sets of pure actions and player types and player types and demonstrate that for all games with sufficiently many players, every mixed strategy Nash equilibrium...

Interpret a set of players all playing the same pure strategy and all with similar attributes as a society. Is it consistent with self interested behaviour for a population to organise itself into a relatively small number of societies? In a companion paper we characterised how large e must be,...