CONVENTIONS, SOCIAL PREJUDICES AND DISCRIMINATION - A FESTIVAL GAME WITH MERRYMAKERS

This paper provides a simple game-theoretic account of racial discrimination without assuming individual prejudices as a basic concept. We consider a recurrent situation of a festival game with merrymakers, and give a formulation of a stable convention. We show that stable conventions of one type involve discrimination against one group of players. We look closely into the structure of these stable conventions and consider them in comparison with recent developments of sociological thought on ethnic relations. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers 026, 900 and American Mathematical Society Classification Numbers 90D10, 90D80, 90D99. © 1992.