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"Chwe, Michael Suk-Young"
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Rational ritual
Why do Internet, financial service, and beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why does repetition characterize anthems and ritual speech? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge. Game theory shows that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form common knowledge. Each person wants to participate only if others also participate. Members must have knowledge of each other, knowledge of that knowledge, knowledge of the knowledge of that knowledge, and so on. Michael Chwe applies this insight, with striking erudition, to analyze a range of rituals across history and cultures.
eBook
Structure and strategy in collective action
This article considers both structural and strategic influences on collective action. Each person in a group wants to participate only if the total number taking part is at least her threshold; people use a network to communicate their thresholds.
Journal Article
Rational Ritual
Why do Internet, financial service, and beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why does repetition characterize anthems and ritual speech? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge.
Game theory shows that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form \"common knowledge.\" Each person wants to participate only if others also participate. Members must have knowledge of each other, knowledge of that knowledge, knowledge of the knowledge of that knowledge, and so on. Michael Chwe applies this insight, with striking erudition, to analyze a range of rituals across history and cultures. He shows that public ceremonies are powerful not simply because they transmit meaning from a central source to each audience member but because they let audience members know what other members know. For instance, people watching the Super Bowl know that many others are seeing precisely what they see and that those people know in turn that many others are also watching. This creates common knowledge, and advertisers selling products that depend on consensus are willing to pay large sums to gain access to it. Remarkably, a great variety of rituals and ceremonies, such as formal inaugurations, work in much the same way.
By using a rational-choice argument to explain diverse cultural practices, Chwe argues for a close reciprocal relationship between the perspectives of rationality and culture. He illustrates how game theory can be applied to an unexpectedly broad spectrum of problems, while showing in an admirably clear way what game theory might hold for scholars in the social sciences and humanities who are not yet acquainted with it.
eBook
Confronting Hate Collectively
Intimidation and harassment have spiked throughout the United States since the recent presidential election. Women, people of color, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and LGBTQ people--including many of our own students--report palpable fear. In the 10 days after Election Day, the Southern Poverty Law Center collected 867 reports of hateful intimidation and harassment (Southern Poverty Law Center 2016). On November 16, 2016, a man in Sarasota, Florida, reported being physically attacked by a person who said, \"You know my new president says we can kill all you f-ggots now\" (Masek 2016). On November 17, 2016, a Puerto Rican family's car was vandalized in West Springfield, Massachusetts, with the words \"Trump\" and \"Go home\" scratched into it (Yan, Sgueglia, and Walker 2016). In late November 2016, more than 10 mosques received letters saying that Trump will \"do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews\" (Guerra 2016). In February and March 2017, Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Rochester, New York, were desecrated (Berlinger and Frehse 2017; Chokshi 2017).
Journal Article
Rationally constructing the dimensions of the political sphere
I construct a game-theoretic model in which people have preferences over two issues, but in which people rationally and endogenously choose to reveal their preferences over only one of them, leaving the other private and irrelevant for political action. In this way, people \"construct\" the political sphere to include one issue and not the other. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article
Minority Voting Rights Can Maximize Majority Welfare
I use Condorcet's information aggregation model to show that sometimes the best possible decision procedure for the majority allows the minority to “enforce” its favored outcome even when overruled by a majority. “Special” voting power gives the minority an incentive to participate meaningfully, and more participation means more information is aggregated, which makes the majority better off. This result can be understood as a mathematical corroboration of Lani Guinier's arguments that voting procedures can be designed to encourage minority participation, benefitting everyone.
Journal Article
Communication and Coordination in Social Networks
I model people in a coordination game who use a communication network to tell each other their willingness to participate. The minimal sufficient networks for coordination can be interpreted as placing people into a hierarchy of social roles or “stages”: “initial adopters”, then “followers”, and so on down to “late adopters”. A communication network helps coordination in exactly two ways: by informing each stage about earlier stages, and by creating common knowledge within each stage. We then consider two examples: first we show that “low dimensional” networks can be better for coordination even though they have far fewer links than “high dimensional” networks; second we show that wide dispersion of “insurgents”, people predisposed toward participation, can be good for coordination but too much dispersion can be bad.
Journal Article