Andrew Schotter

Andrew Schotter, professor of economics at New York University, will study how norms of behavior are created and passed on from generation to generation. Schotter will approach the problem through experimental game theory: players come and go, but games can continue indefinitely, presenting successive generations of players with the same strategic choices. People may respond by blindly following the conventions handed down to them by their predecessors. Schotter will run experiments in which each round of participants is encouraged both to learn from their predecessors and to help their successors. Schotter will discover if conventions are passed on, and how. He will also examine what happens when old conventions die and new ones take hold.

Working Papers:

• Social Learning and Coordination Conventions in Inter-Generational Games: An Experiment in Lamarckian Evolutionary Dynamics
• An Experimental Study of Belief Learning Using Elicited Beliefs