This paper presents a simple model where microfounded dynamics of cultural identity are endogenous and interact with an international trade equilibrium. This process generates a strong home bias under autarky. We then show that goods market integration causes a phenomenon of cultural divergence, whereby the distributions of cultures become more dissimilar across countries and one of the culture...

A quantitative understanding of societies requires useful combinations of empirical data and mathematical models. Models of cultural dynamics aim at explaining the emergence of culturally homogeneous groups through social influence. Traditionally, the initial cultural traits of individuals are chosen uniformly at random, the emphasis being on characterizing the model outcomes that are independe...

Increasing European co-operation must take place in many areas, including medical ethics. Against the background of common cultural norms and pluralistic variation within political traditions, religion and lifestyles, Europe will have to converge towards unity within the field of medical ethics. This article examines how such convergence might develop with respect to four major areas: European ...

An outstanding open problem is whether collective social phenomena occurring over short timescales can systematically reduce cultural heterogeneity in the long run, and whether offline and online human interactions contribute differently to the process. Theoretical models suggest that short-term collective behavior and long-term cultural diversity are mutually excluding, since they require very...

In order to overcome the weakness that particle swarm optimization algorithm is likely to fall into local minimum when the complex optimization problems are solved, a new adaptive dynamic particle swarm optimization algorithm is proposed. The paper introduces the evaluation index of particle swarm premature convergence to judge the state of particle swarm in the population space, for the sake o...

For over a half a century, indigenous knowledge systems have captured the attention of anthropologists (Hunn 2007). Recently, interest has intensified both inside and outside the discipline among scholars and practitioners in a wide variety of contexts ranging from international development, resource management, sustainability and resilience, disaster response, climate change, ethnobotany, ethn...

Language provides a powerful instance of cultural evolution where individuals learn from each other and convergence to functionally similar states is advantageous. Recent studies exploring the evolutionary dynamics of populations of language learners have shown promising results regarding linguistic convergence and diversity. These studies often assume a set of equally related languages. In thi...