Andersen’s “Emperor’s New Clothes” as an Evolutionary Coordination Game with Stochastic Stability

We model Andersen’s “Emperor’s New Clothes” as a coordination game under evolutionary dynamics. Citizens choose between praising non-existent clothes (C) and telling the truth (T), facing conformity gains and stigma for dissent. Payoff differences are monotone in the share of conformists, yielding a unique threshold x∗. Under replicator dynamics, all-C and all-T are asymptotically stable with an unstable threshold. With rare idiosyncratic plays (Young, 1993), we characterise stochastic stability via reduced resistances, and we outline the conditions under which a single truthful outburst causes the conformist convention to collapse, while restoring it requires many coordinated mistakes. The result is robust to payoff specifications that preserve monotone thresholds and clarifies when a small public deviation triggers a norm cascade.