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Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: the Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

In The Grammar of Society, Cristina Bicchieri examines social norms, such as fairness, cooperation, and reciprocity, in an effort to understand their nature and dynamics, the expectations that they generate, and how they evolve and change. Drawing on several intellectual traditions and methods, including those of social psychology, experimental economics and evolutionary game theory, Bicchieri provides an integrated account of how social norms emerge, why and when we follow them, and the situations where we are most likely to focus on relevant norms. Examining the existence and survival of inefficient norms, she demonstrates how norms evolve in ways that depend upon the psychological dispositions of the individual and how such dispositions may impair social efficiency. By contrast, she also shows how certain psychological propensities may naturally lead individuals to evolve fairness norms that closely resemble those we follow in most modern societies.

Critical Reviews

"In The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, Cristina Bicchieri presents a new interpretation of social norms that will offend psychologists, economists, and sociologists alike, and therein lies its value."
- Joachim I. Krueger

"Grammar is...interesting for its focused attempt to articulate how one conception of social norms can be made experimentally possible...Bicchieri should be praised for pursuing this kind of investigation."
Chauncey Maher, Georgetown University, Ethics

“A stimulating work for scholars in social psychology, experimental economics and evolutionary game theory, this book motivates unexplored streams of research and provides an integrated and testable account of the role of norms in strategic interactions.”
Economics and Philosophy

“In this timely and accessible book, Cristina Bicchieri tries to capture the essential features of social norms. This is a laudable initiative because social scientists in different disciplines often apply different definitions.”
De Economist [download full review]

"...Bicchieri explores with great insight the implications of behavior game theory and experimental economics for a model of the interaction of social norms and Bayesian rationality. This should provide a rich mine of ideas for researchers interested in the formal modeling of epistemic and evolutionary social theory."
Herbert Gintis [download full review]

"...A stimulating work for scholars in social psychology, experimental economics and evolutionary game theory, this book motivates unexplored streams of research and provides an integrated and testable account of the role of norms in strategic interactions."
Graciela Küchle and Diego Ríos, Witten/Herdecke University [download full review]

"...This is a stimulating work, and an introduction to a robust research pro- gram. It integrates empirical data and insights from a variety of fields to illuminate a central question in the social sciences. The reader’s attention will be well repaid."
Brian Skyrms, University of California, Irvine [download full review]

"[The Grammar of Society] provides a provocative discussion of norms from a game theoretic perspective, dealing with both empirical research and social phenomena ... there are many high-level theoretical insights the book provides, and a fairly broad coverage of experimental results in the ultimatum game and social dilemma games. Most importantly, the book provides some solid formal grounding for models of social and cultural systems and beliefs, and will hopefully promote future research in the area."
Shane T. Mueller and Winston R. Sieck [download full review]

"Bicchieri’s book is full of philosophical insight, and is potentially the most important contribution to social ontology for many years to come. ... Bicchieri provides exactly what is required from this respect, including a number of wonderful methodological examples of how to intelligently use scientific knowledge to illuminate a philosophical debate. I hope that all philosophers of social science will read it, learn its lessons, and apply them in their own work."
Francesco Guala, University of Exeter [download full review]

Cristina Bicchieri, Richard Jeffrey, and Brian Skyrms (editors), The Logic of Strategy, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Edited by three leading figures in the field, this exciting volume presents cutting-edge work in decision theory by a distinguished international roster of contributors. These mostly unpublished papers address a host of crucial areas in the contemporary philosophical study of rationality and knowledge. Topics include causal versus evidential decision theory, game theory, backwards induction, bounded rationality, counterfactual reasoning in games and in general, analyses of the famous common knowledge assumptions in game theory, and evaluations of the normal versus extensive form formulations of complex decision problems.

Cristina Bicchieri, Richard Jeffrey, Brian Skyrms (editors), The Dynamics of Norms, Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction and Decision Theory, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

In the social sciences norms are sometimes taken to play a key explanatory role. Yet norms differ from group to group, from society to society, and from species to species. How are norms formed and how do they change? This 'state-of-the-art' collection of essays presents some of the best contemporary research into the dynamic processes underlying the formation, maintenance, metamorphosis and dissolution of norms. The volume combines formal modelling with more traditional analysis, and considers biological and cultural evolution, individual learning, and rational deliberation. In filling a significant gap in the current literature this volume will be of particular interest to economists, political scientists and sociologists, in addition to philosophers of the social sciences.

Critical Reviews

“Cristina Bicchieri’s essay, ‘‘Learning to Cooperate’’ (originally published in this journal in 1990), gives the broadest and most philosophically interesting account of norms in the book. She argues that norms of cooperation ‘‘emerge as equilibria of learning dynamics in small-group interactions’’ (p. 17). Given the many equilibria possible in repeated games, "the equilibrium account of norms must be supplemented with a story of how interacting agents learn to recognize a behavioral pattern, how they settle upon a stable pattern, and what sort of behavior is more likely to be sustainable as a norm" (p. 24). Ironically, in contrast to Axelrod, Bicchieri defends Tit-for-Tat in an evolutionary context. She does so by weakening the premises of her model. Where Axelrod’s "initial strategies are randomly chosen from the set of all possible strategies ... I believe that, on the contrary, there are cognitive constraints on the possible strategies that may emerge as stable behavioral patterns in repeated small-group interactions" (p. 36). She goes on to extend her model from small to large groups.”
Peter Danielson, University of British Columbia

Cristina Bicchieri, Rationality and Coordination, Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction and Decision Theory, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

This book explores how individual actions coordinate to produce unintended social consequences. In the past this phenomenon has been explained as the outcome of rational, self-interested individual behaviour. Professor Bicchieri shows that this is in no way a satisfying explanation. She discusses how much knowledge is needed by agents in order to coordinate successfully. If the answer is unbounded knowledge, then a whole variety of paradoxes arise. If the answer is very little knowledge, then there seems hardly any possibility of attaining coordination. The solution to coordination and cooperation is for agents to learn about each other. The author concludes that rationality must be supplemented by models of learning and by an evolutionary account of how social order (i.e. spontaneous coordinated behaviour) can persist.

Critical Reviews

“The main achievement of this book is to show how the central project of classical game theory – to predict the outcomes of interactions between rational agents – fails. If this conclusion no longer seems radical, that is only because of the earlier work of people like Cristina Bicchieri, who questioned the fundamental assumptions of the theory when doing so was not fashionable.”
Robert Sugden, University of East Anglia

“This book is well informed and well written. Bicchieri is familiar with contemporary work in economics and game theory. The book, however, is written in a way that does not presuppose any background in these areas. I am in general agreement with Bicchieri's criticisms of traditional game theory, and I believe that the themes of bounded rationality, learning dynamics, and cultural evolution should and will play an increasingly important role in game theory and its applications in philosophy, political theory and economics. This is a book which deserves to be widely read and discussed.”
Brian Skyrms, University of California, Irvine

“This book can be recommended to philosophers with an interest in game theory as a discipline. It sticks squarely to the project of modeling social interactions in terms of the preference rankings and beliefs of individuals, give or take a push or two from evolutionary mechanisms.”
Margaret Gilbert, University of Connecticut, Storr

“In the present volume, Bicchieri succeeds in explaining the recent developments in game theory in a largely nontechnical way, and by doing so she is able to point to several difficulties in the foundations of the theory. The book is of interest to social scientists in general, but philosophers should find it especially stimulating.”
Eric Van Damme, Center, Tilburg University

“This book gives a clear overview of recent game theoretic work on the issue how individual players can reason towards an equilibrium. The central question is how much knowledge players should be endowed with for them to be able to make the inferences that lead them to choose equilibrium strategies. The title of the book, Rationality and Coordination, is then easily explained by noting that an equilibrium of a game can be interpreted as an outcome in which the individual strategies of the players are coordinated. A remarkable feature of the book is that the reader hardly needs any knowledge of game theory in order to follow the arguments: concepts like subgame perfection, proper equilibrium, and forward induction are first introduced before being scrutinised. Thus, the book can be used as an introduction to game theory for students who are interested in the (epistemological) foundations of this discipline.
Maarten C. W. Janssen, Erasmus University Rotterdam

“Cristina Bicchieri, professor of philosophy and social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, has written a lucid and thoughtful study exploring the nature of the rationality assumption as it is employed in economics in general and in game theory specifically. ... Game theory has forced social scientists in general and economists in particular to confront the issue of rationality. Until we explore systematically the nature of what we mean by that term we shall make little further progress in the social sciences. The author of this study has made an important contribution by intelligently exploring the issues that must be confronted.”
Douglass C. North, Washington University, St. Louis

“In her book Rationality and Coordination (Cambridge University Press 1994) Cristina Bicchieri brings together (and adds to) her own contributions to game theory and the philosophy of economics published in various journals in the period 1987-1992. The book, however, is not a collection of separate articles but rather a homogeneous unit organized around some central themes in the foundations of non-cooperative game theory. Bicchieri's exposition is admirably clear and well organized. Somebody with a good knowledge of game theory would probably benefit mainly from reading the second part of Chapter 3 (from Section 3.6 onward) and Chapter 4. On the other hand, those who have had little exposure to game theory, would certainly benefit from reading the entire book.”
Giacomo Bonanno, University of California, Davis

“... The beauty of this book is its capacity to link modal logic and evolutionary biology in the attempt to deal with the contradictions and lacunae of classical game theory. She does not provide a neat, logically tight, argument, but rather experiments with a number of fruitful ideas that draw her in different, and often incompatible, directions. ...”
Herbert Gintis [download full review]

Cristina Bicchieri, Maria Luisa Dalla Chiara, editors, Knowledge, Belief, and Strategic Interaction, Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction and Decision Theory, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

There has been a great deal of interaction among game theorists, philosophers and logicians in certain foundational problems concerning rationality, the formalization of knowledge and practical reasoning, and models of learning and deliberation. This volume brings together the work of some of the pre-eminent figures in their respective disciplines, all of whom are engaged in research at the forefront of their fields. Together they offer a conspectus of the interaction of game theory, logic and epistemology in the formal models of knowledge, belief, deliberation and learning, and in the relationship between Bayesian decision theory and game theory, as well as between bounded rationality and computational complexity.

“...there are contributions using epistemic logic, contributions on computability and algorithms, and on the acquisition of common knowledge and the dynamics of belief change. The wide range of topics shows that this is a rapidly growing area of research.”
Maarten Janssen, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam

Cristina Bicchieri, Ragioni per Credere, Ragioni per Fare: Convenzioni e Vincoli nel Metodo Scientifico, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1988.