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Article
The Iron Law of Selfishness: Response to a comment by Alexander Field
Journal of Economic Perspectives (2003)
  • Ted Bergstrom, University of California, Santa Barbara
Abstract

Alexander Field was not convinced of a result that I claimed in my JEP 2001 paper that in "haystack models" with non-assortative mating, if the number of descendants of founding group members is determined by an n-player prisoners' dilemma game, then the population will converge to a population of defectors. He thought that the result applied only if the groups were large. I respond with a more detailed discussion and show how the result works even when groups have only two members.

Keywords
  • altruism,
  • assortative matching,
  • group selection
Disciplines
Publication Date
Spring 2003
Citation Information
Ted Bergstrom. "The Iron Law of Selfishness: Response to a comment by Alexander Field" Journal of Economic Perspectives Vol. 96 Iss. 1 (2003)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/ted_bergstrom/42/