Apr. 17th- 12-1pm in 27 Persson Auditorium

Erik Lillethun (ECON)

Assistant Professor of Economics

• Title: Designing Information to Foster Evolution Toward Cooperation
• Description: Concealing and obfuscating information has a bad reputation as being harmful to information recipients. However, it has been proven to be potentially beneficial in many settings. In this talk, I will demonstrate that information may be manipulated to promote evolution toward more cooperative behavior in strategic settings (i.e., games). Of particular interest are games such as the famous Stag Hunt, where there is a conflict between a personally risky but prosocial choice and a safe choice. Past research has shown that evolutionary learning dynamics tend to lead to the safe choice over time. However, I show that if a benevolent designer controls the information that players have about other people's choices, those same evolutionary learning dynamics lead to the prosocial outcome. Surprisingly, it does so by making the prosocial behavior look like the safe behavior. This makes players less certain that others are actually making the safe choice, even when it appears so. I will also discuss the implications of these results for social media platforms.