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Are we always being nudged?
with Andreas Maaløe Jespersen
According to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness (2008) behavior can be greatly influenced by small changes in the context. That this is true is a well-established fact of behavioral economics known since...
The problem of conceptualization in the evolution of convention
The last 25 years has seen a surge of interest in evolutive or ‘evolutionary’ forms of game theory as the correct approach in the study of the emergence and persistence of social conventions. This development has occurred at the expense of the epistemic rationalism that used to prevail throughout game theory including its synthesis with the study of convention originating with David Lewis’ Convention: A Philosophical Study (1969). Examining the preconditions of a prominent model of the evolution of convention – the Dirichlet model of Peter Vanderschraaf’s Learning and Coordination (2001) – this paper argues that evolutive models only serve their purpose if allowed to presuppose pre-tailored and ad hoc conceptualizations of the recurrent informal decision problems faced by the agents and assumed to be solved by conventions. We label the problem of accounting for how agents arrive at such conceptualizations suitable for the evolution of convention as the problem of conceptualization. We then argue that its solution seem to pre-suppose either pre-existing conventions, and thus that evolutive models only work by begging the kind of questions they were devised to answer; or epistemic reasoning procedures about coordination carried out by the agents involved.
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