Cultural Transmission with Incomplete Information: Parental Perceived Efficacy and Group Misrepresentation

36 Pages Posted: 28 Mar 2019

See all articles by Sebastiano Della Lena

Sebastiano Della Lena

Ca Foscari University of Venice - Dipartimento di Economia

Fabrizio Panebianco

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca - Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Economics, Psychology & Social Sciences (CISEPS); Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca - Department of Economics, Management and Statistics (DEMS)

Date Written: March 22, 2019

Abstract

This paper introduces incomplete information in the standard model of cultural transmission (Bisin and Verdier, 2001). We allow parents to ignore own group size and the efficiency of their cultural transmission technology, while receiving a feedback from their children. Using the self-confirming equilibrium concept, parents may end up to sustain, and be confirmed about, wrong conjectures. We show that in equilibrium optimal socialization efforts display cultural complementarity with respect to own population share, while the standard substitution result holds with respect their own conjectured population shares. Considering the population dynamics, if conjectures about population shares are shaped by cultural leaders who want to maximize the presence of own traits in the next period, then conjectures are characterized by negative biases. Our main finding is that, depending on the magnitude of the bias, the dynamics can display stable or unstable polymorphic equilibria, or just a stable homomorphic equilibrium, potentially reverting standard predictions.

Keywords: Cultural Transmission, Incomplete Information, Selfconfirming Equilibrium, Group Under-Representation, Parental Perceived Efficacy, Cultural leaders

JEL Classification: C72, D10, D80, J10, Z10

Suggested Citation

Della Lena, Sebastiano and Panebianco, Fabrizio, Cultural Transmission with Incomplete Information: Parental Perceived Efficacy and Group Misrepresentation (March 22, 2019). University Ca' Foscari of Venice, Dept. of Economics Research Paper Series No. 11/WP/2019 , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3361152 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3361152

Sebastiano Della Lena (Contact Author)

Ca Foscari University of Venice - Dipartimento di Economia ( email )

Cannaregio 873
Venice, 30121
Italy

Fabrizio Panebianco

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca - Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Economics, Psychology & Social Sciences (CISEPS) ( email )

Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo, 1
Milano, 20126
Italy

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca - Department of Economics, Management and Statistics (DEMS) ( email )

Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo, 1
Milan, 20126
Italy

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