我院教师在经济学期刊发表论文

2021年03月30日

2021年1月，我院助理教授Jin-yeong Sohn和美国亚利桑那大学博士生Alexander Schaefer在经济学期刊Economics and Philosophy发表了题为“Unraveling into War: Trust and Social Preferences in Hobbes's State of Nature”的论文。

长期以来，社会科学家一直热衷于使用现代博弈论将过去的经典理论（由于过去缺乏规范技术，这些理论的精确度较低）进行规范化。托马斯·霍布斯的自然状态理论就是这样一个经典理论。许多学者构建了霍布斯理论的正式模型，但这些模型依然存在不足，它们忽略了个体的心理多样性和对他人社会动机的不确定性或霍布斯所说的“谦虚”。但是，正如霍布斯在《利维坦》中所描述的那样，对他人动机的不确定性促进形成自然状态。本文通过引入社会偏好和不完全信息模型，对这一理论进行了大幅度改进和完善。

Assistant Professor Jin-yeong Sohn's Paper Published in Economics and Philosophy

March 30, 2021

Jin-yeong Sohn, IAER Assistant Professor, published his paper in Economics and Philosophy in January 2021. Entitled "Unraveling into War: Trust and Social Preferences in Hobbes's State of Nature", the paper was co-authored with Alexander Schaefer, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arizona.

Social scientists have long been interested in formalizing classical theories of the past (which were less precise due to the lack of formal techniques), using modern game theory. One of such classical theories is Thomas Hobbes's theory of State of Nature. Many scholars have tried to build formal models of the Hobbesian theory, but the existing models fall short in several desiderata. This paper proposes a theoretical reconstruction of the Hobbesian theory which improves upon the existing models in several aspects. In particular, existing models have abstract away from psychological diversity of individuals and uncertainty about others' social motives or "modesty" as Hobbes calls it. But, as illustrated in Leviathan, Hobbes claims that uncertainty about others' motives to be an important contributor to the state of nature. The authors make significant improvements on this front by using models of social preferences and incomplete information.