
Social conformity despite individual preferences for distinctiveness - luu
http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/3/140437
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swatow
The problem with this sort of analysis is that its trivial (assuming you have
time) to turn any common sense argument into a mathematical model. In game
theory, it's unlikely that the math is ever going to say "I can't let you do
that" [1].

What actually gets published tends to be filtered by its political content. In
particular, results with a liberal bias tend to be promoted.

[1] In classical economics, the reverse holds. It's very hard to show that any
mechanism is possible under the assumptions of classical economics. Hence the
huge number of negative results: (a) Coase theorem, (b) the Modigliani-Miller
Theorem (irrelevance of capital structure) and (c) Ricardian equivalence. All
these results basically say that if you try to do X (where X is (a) change
people's actions that have externalities by assigning property rights, (b)
change the value of a firm by changing its capital structure, and (c) change
people's actions by government spending), the free market will completely undo
your actions and leave the situation unchanged.

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pja
Don’t most of those theorems require rational agents ("homo economicus") with
perfect knowledge?

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swatow
Yes, and so we should treat the result with caution. But the results I were
critiquing are worse, because they assume homo economicus plus some very
specific deviations, or some very specific (non-free market) environment.

The paper (and most game theory based papers) also assumes that people are
perfectly rational and have perfect knowledge. The only difference is that
instead of actions being restricted to the free market, and payoffs being
consumption, game theory allows an arbitrary environment (chosen by the paper
author) to provide the actions and payoffs.

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pja
Somewhere I have bookmarked a list of all the assumptions that go into the
"classic" theorems of economics, written by a practising academic in the
field. I’ll try and dig it out.

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swatow
You seem to have missed my point. Either way, you are making a lot of
assumptions. It's like "assume zero friction" vs "assume friction follows
exactly this formula". In either case, your result is wrong if friction isn't
exactly as you specify.

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pja
You seem to be assuming that I’m trying to put you down instead of
contributing (hopefuly) interesting things to a mutually beneficial
discussion. Online discourse in a nutshell sadly.

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beefman
Just scanning this, but it looks like a huge attractor for conformity is baked
into the model, in eq 3.1. Each agent prefers to be some number of standard
deviations from the mean. If conformity increases, the standard deviation
shrinks and all preferred distances from a fixed point (the mean) shrink. They
note it themselves, that if the entire population starts at the same point, it
is an equilibrium, regardless of how the other model variables are
initialized. This seems to me entirely artificial.

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enupten
Explains the Goth coterie from South park :)

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bitwize
Pretty sure the paper was intended to explain the hipster phenomenon in real
life. However, other commenters have flagged up its methodological flaws.

