Dossier 4 : Interactions sociales et institutions

L’économie

Automne 2022, Collège universitaire - Sciences Po

Nouveaux concepts/notions à maı̂triser :

— dilemme social et théorie des jeux
— meilleure réponse
— équilibre en stratégies dominantes
— équilibre de Nash
— préférences sociales : altruisme et réciprocité
— efficacité au sens de Pareto
— Tragédie des biens communs
— Passager clandestin
— Normes
— Jeux répétés
— Institutions

Exercice 1. Publicité et Dilemme du Prisonnier

On considère deux entreprises se partageant le marché du savon. Elles ont toutes les deux le
choix de lancer ou non une campagne de publicité. La taille du marché du savon n’est pas
affectée par les éventuelles campagnes publicitaires, mais mener une campagne de publicité
permet de gagner des parts de marché.

On représente dans le tableau suivant les bénéfices des deux entreprises en millions d’euros. Le
premier nombre entre parenthèses correspond au profit de la firme B et le deuxième à celui de
la firme A.
Firme A
Pas de Publicité Publicité
Firme B
Pas de Publicité (5 ; 10) (-2 ; 13)
Publicité (6 ; 7) (1 ; 8)

1. Existe-t-il une stratégie dominante pour la firme A ? Pour la firme B ?

2. Existe-t-il un équilibre de Nash dans cet exemple ? Est-il Pareto optimal ?

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 3. La firme A propose d’acheter la firme B et est prête à payer un prix supérieur au prix
actuel de la firme B pour mener ce projet. En quoi ce rachat pourrait être un bon
investissement ?

Exercice 2. Altruisme
En utilisant les mêmes axes que dans la figure ci-dessous :

1. À quoi ressembleraient les courbes d’indifférence d’Anil si l’utilité d’Anil n’augmente

que si sa consommation augmente proportionnellement avec celle de Bala ?

2. À quoi ressembleraient-elles s’il retirait de l’utilité uniquement de la somme totale de sa

consommation et celle de Bala ?

3. À quoi ressembleraient-elles s’il retirait de l’utilité uniquement de sa propre

consommation / s’il retirait de l’utilité uniquement de la consommation de Bala ?

4. Dans chacun de ces cas, proposez une situation du monde réel dans laquelle Anil
pourrait avoir ces préférences, en précisant comment Anil et Bala obtiennent leurs
gains.

Lecture : Economie expérimentale et Théorie des jeux

Le texte ci-dessous est un article issu de The Economist du 20 janvier 2005. Après l’avoir lu,
vous répondrez aux questions suivantes :
— Existe-t-il une stratégie dominante dans le jeu décrit par cet article si les participants
s’attendent à y jouer une seule fois ?

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 — Quelle stratégie devient possible lorsque le jeu est répété plusieurs fois avec les mêmes
personnes ? Cela vous semble-t-il une bonne stratégie ?

— En quoi cette expérience vient-elle compléter les résultats théoriques de la théorie des
jeux ?

— Quelle pourrait être, selon vous, une des limites de ce type d’expérience en laboratoire ?

Games People Play - The co-operative and the selfish are equally successful at getting what
they want

Many people, it is said, regard life as a game. Increasingly, both biologists and economists are
tending to agree with them. Game theory, a branch of mathematics developed in the 1940s and
1950s by John von Neumann and John Nash, has proved a useful theoretical tool in the study of
the behaviour of animals, both human and non-human.

An important part of game theory is to look for competitive strategies that are unbea-
table in the context of the fact that everyone else is also looking for them. Sometimes these
strategies involve co-operation, sometimes not. Sometimes the “game” will result in every-
body playing the same way. Sometimes they will need to behave differently from one another.

But there has been a crucial difference in the approach taken by the two schools of resear-
chers. When discussing the outcomes of these games, animal behaviourists speak of “evolutio-
narily stable strategies”, with the implication that the way they are played has been hard-wired
into the participants by the processes of natural selection. Economists prefer to talk of Nash
equilibria and, since economics is founded on the idea of rational human choice, the implica-
tion is that people will adjust their behaviour (whether consciously or unconsciously is slightly
ambiguous) in order to maximise their gains. But a study just published in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, by Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania and
Daniel Houser of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, calls the economists’ underlying
assumption into question. This study suggests that it may be fruitful to work with the idea that
human behaviour, too, can sometimes be governed by evolutionarily stable strategies.

Double or quits ? Dr Kurzban and Dr Houser were interested in the outcomes of what
are known as public-goods games. In their particular case they chose a game that involved
four people who had never met (and who interacted via a computer) making decisions about
their own self-interest that involved assessing the behaviour of others. Each player was given
a number of virtual tokens, redeemable for money at the end of the game. A player could
keep some or all of these tokens. Any not kept were put into a pool, to be shared among
group members. After the initial contributions had been made, the game continued for a ran-
dom number of turns, with each player, in turn, being able to add to or subtract from his
contribution to the pool. When the game ended, the value of the pool was doubled, and the
new, doubled value was divided into four equal parts and given to the players, along with
the value of any tokens they had held on to. If everybody trusts each other, therefore, they
will all be able to double their money. But a sucker who puts all his money into the pool

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when no one else has contributed at all will end up with only half what he started with.

This is a typical example of the sort of game that economists investigating game theory
revel in, and both theory and practice suggests that a player can take one of three approaches
in such a game : co-operate with his opponents to maximise group benefits (but at the risk of
being suckered), free-ride (ie, try to sucker co-operators) or reciprocate (ie, co-operate with
those who show signs of being co-operative, but not with free-riders). Previous investiga-
tions of such strategies, though, have focused mainly on two-player games, in which stra-
tegy need be developed only in a quite simple context. The situation Dr Kurzban and Dr
Houser created was a little more like real life. They wanted to see whether the behavioural
types were clear-cut in the face of multiple opponents who might be playing different stra-
tegies, whether those types were stable, and whether they had the same average pay-off.

The last point is crucial to the theory of evolutionarily stable strategies. Individual strate-
gies are not expected to be equally represented in a population. Instead, they should appear in
proportions that equalise their pay-offs to those who play them. A strategy can be advantageous
when rare and disadvantageous when common. The proportions in the population when all stra-
tegies are equally advantageous represent the equilibrium.

And that was what happened. The researchers were able to divide their subjects very cleanly
into co-operators, free-riders and reciprocators, based on how many tokens they contributed to
the pool, and how they reacted to the collective contributions of others. Of 84 participants,
81 fell unambiguously into one of the three categories. Having established who was who, they
then created “bespoke” games, to test whether people changed strategy. They did not. Dr
Kurban and Dr Houser were thus able to predict the outcomes of these games quite relia-
bly. And the three strategies did, indeed, have the same average pay-offs to the individuals
who played them—though only 13% were co-operators, 20% free-riders and 63% reciprocators.

This is only a preliminary result, but it is intriguing. It suggests that people’s approaches
to co-operation with their fellows are, indeed, evolutionarily stable. Of course, it is a long
stretch from showing equal success in a laboratory game to showing it in the mating game that
determines evolutionary outcomes. But it is good to know that in this context at least, nice
guys do not come last. They do just as well as the nasty guys and, indeed, as the wary majority.