Peers and Culture* |
| |
Authors: | María Sáez‐Martí Anna Sjögren |
| |
Affiliation: | 1. University of Zürich, CH‐8006 Zürich, Switzerland saez@iew.uzh.ch;2. Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Box 55665, SE‐102 15 Stockholm, Sweden anna.sjogren@ifn.se |
| |
Abstract: | We analyze the evolution of culture when parents socialize children to the cultural variants that maximize child lifetime utility. Parents invest in cultural transmission by taking into account that children are also influenced by peers. We model the influence of peers by assuming that children observe different cultural variants in their peer group, assign merit to them and adopt one variant, following a probabilistic adoption rule. We show that cultural diversity is sustainable even if all parents strive to transmit the same variant. We also show that a parental demand for cultural pluralism does not guarantee cultural diversity. |
| |
Keywords: | Cultural transmission cultural diversity peer groups oblique transmission D10 I20 J13 |
|
|