Overlapping Generations Models of Graded Age-Group Societies: Economics Meets Ethnography

Across much of the world tribal societies are organized into age groups. In these age-group societies, social and economic relations between individuals are regulated by well-established rules governing transitions through the lifecycle. In this paper we detail the relationship between the classic formulations in Stewart's (1977) "Fundamentals of Age-Group Systems" and the overlapping generations (OLG) model. We establish that OLG models can accurately represent a large subset of actual age-group societies called graded age-set societies. Thus, an OLG model bears a close resemblance to reality.