Evolution of individual preferences and persistence of family rules
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Evolution of individual preferences and persistence of family rules Alessandro Cigno1 Alessandro Gioffré1 Annalisa Luporini1 ●
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Received: 25 June 2019 / Accepted: 12 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020; This article is published with open access
Abstract How does the distribution of individual preferences evolve as a result of marriage between individuals with different preferences? Could a family rule be self-enforcing given individual preferences, and remain such for several generations despite preference evolution? We show that it is in a couple’s common interest to obey a rule requiring them to give specified amounts of attention to their elderly parents if the couple’s preferences satisfy a certain condition, and the same condition is rationally expected to hold also where their children and respective spouses are concerned. Given uncertainty about who their children will marry, a couple’s expectations will reflect the probability distribution of preferences in the next generation. We show that, in any given generation, some couples may obey the rule in question and some may not. It is also possible that a couple will obey the rule, but their descendants will not for a number of generations, and then obey it again. In the long run, if matching is entirely random, either everybody obeys the same rule, or nobody obeys any. If matching is restricted to particular subpopulations identifiable by some visible trait, such as religion or color of the skin, different subpopulations may obey different rules. The policy implications are briefly discussed. Keywords Family rule Care of the elderly Matching Evolution Migration ●
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JEL classification C78 D13 J12 ●
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1 Introduction The tenet underlying most of microeconomics until not very long ago was that rational individuals with given preferences and endowments optimize subject only to the law of the land. More recently, economists have started to talk of norms or rules,
* Annalisa Luporini annalisa.luporini@unifi.it 1
Department of Economics and Management, University of Florence, Firenze, Italy
A. Cigno et al.
and to examine their implications in different contexts. Cigno (1993) shows that individuals may be constrained by self-enforcing family rules which are themselves a collectively rational response to the economic and legal environment. This line of thought is developed in a series of papers including, among others, Rosati (1996), Anderberg and Balestrino (2003), and Barnett et al. (2018).1Young (1998) and Caillaud and Cohen (2000) follow essentially the same approach to explain the emergence of self-enforcing rules at the societal, rather than family level (“social norms”).2 Another strand of economic literature, stemming from Bisin and Verdier (2001), and Tabellini (2008), assumes that optimizing parents, motivated either by a paternalistic form of altruism, or by a social conscience, undertake costly actions to transmit their values on to their offspring. These values are then modified by the interaction with other individuals who recei
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