Poverty Traps, Rationality and Evolution

We study an economy with heterogenous workers and firms as a two population game, in normal form, and its evolutionary dynamics implied by strategic complementarities. The population of firms is distributed in two groups, innovative and non innovative, while workers need to choose between two strategies, acquiring skills or remaining unskilled. Without having knowledge of the firms’ distribution, a worker reviews her strategy by asking herself whether it is worth it to change behavior or not. Rational choice on her part is taken, hereafter, to imply that she will choose the strategy which she expect to yield the greatest payoff, on the basis of her beliefs and the current state of the economy. By imitating successful agents, if the initial shares of innovative firms and skilled agents are “too small”, an economy eventually lead into a poverty trap. Hence, when an economy is close to a poverty trap, rationality may act as an actual obstacle to a take-off.