Four essays on social conventions

Abstract

In this thesis, I analyze how and why social conventions emerge across distinct contexts and their impact on different economic environments. In the first and fourth chapters, I employ evolutionary game theory techniques to study the formation of social conventions in two strategic situations: a coordination game and a conflict game. In the second chapter, I use a signaling game to study the relevance of homophily in guiding the formation of social groups among employees and the consequent impact on labor market outcomes. In the third chapter, I conducted two field experiments to assess how people react to different shares of the population doing an activity, which is crucial in understanding the emergence of social conventions.