Formal Fridays: Cailin O'Connor (UCI)

Cailin O'Connor (LPS, UC Irvine) gives a talk as part of the Formal Fridays series:
Title: Fairness and Signaling
Abstract: Philosophers and economists have used cultural evolutionary models of bargaining to understand issues related to fairness and justice, and especially how fair and unfair conventions and norms might arise in human societies. One line of this research shows how the presence of social categories in such models allows for inequitable equilibria that are not possible in models without social categories. This is taken to help explain why in human groups with social categories inequity is often the rule rather than the exception. But in previous models, it is typically assumed that these categories are rigid, easily observable, and binary. In reality, social categories are not always so tidy. We introduce evolutionary models where the tags connected with social categories can be flexible, variable, or difficult to observe, i.e., where these tags can carry different amounts of information about group membership. We show how alterations to these tags can undermine the stability of unfair conventions. We argue that these results can inform projects intended to ameliorate inequity, especially projects that seek to alter the properties of category markers.