3,143 research outputs found
Conformity-Driven Agents Support Ordered Phases in the Spatial Public Goods Game
We investigate the spatial Public Goods Game in the presence of
fitness-driven and conformity-driven agents. This framework usually considers
only the former type of agents, i.e., agents that tend to imitate the strategy
of their fittest neighbors. However, whenever we study social systems, the
evolution of a population might be affected also by social behaviors as
conformism, stubbornness, altruism, and selfishness. Although the term
evolution can assume different meanings depending on the considered domain,
here it corresponds to the set of processes that lead a system towards an
equilibrium or a steady-state. We map fitness to the agents' payoff so that
richer agents are those most imitated by fitness-driven agents, while
conformity-driven agents tend to imitate the strategy assumed by the majority
of their neighbors. Numerical simulations aim to identify the nature of the
transition, on varying the amount of the relative density of conformity-driven
agents in the population, and to study the nature of related equilibria.
Remarkably, we find that conformism generally fosters ordered cooperative
phases and may also lead to bistable behaviors.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure
Spatial prisoner's dilemma game with volunteering in Newman-Watts small-world networks
A modified spatial prisoner's dilemma game with voluntary participation in
Newman-Watts small-world networks is studied. Some reasonable ingredients are
introduced to the game evolutionary dynamics: each agent in the network is a
pure strategist and can only take one of three strategies (\emph {cooperator},
\emph {defector}, and \emph {loner}); its strategical transformation is
associated with both the number of strategical states and the magnitude of
average profits, which are adopted and acquired by its coplayers in the
previous round of play; a stochastic strategy mutation is applied when it gets
into the trouble of \emph {local commons} that the agent and its neighbors are
in the same state and get the same average payoffs. In the case of very low
temptation to defect, it is found that agents are willing to participate in the
game in typical small-world region and intensive collective oscillations arise
in more random region.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure
Social Dilemmas and Cooperation in Complex Networks
In this paper we extend the investigation of cooperation in some classical
evolutionary games on populations were the network of interactions among
individuals is of the scale-free type. We show that the update rule, the payoff
computation and, to some extent the timing of the operations, have a marked
influence on the transient dynamics and on the amount of cooperation that can
be established at equilibrium. We also study the dynamical behavior of the
populations and their evolutionary stability.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. to appea
Emergence of social networks via direct and indirect reciprocity
Many models of social network formation implicitly assume that network properties are static in steady-state. In contrast, actual social networks are highly dynamic: allegiances and collaborations expire and may or may not be renewed at a later date. Moreover, empirical studies show that human social networks are dynamic at the individual level but static at the global level: individuals' degree rankings change considerably over time, whereas network-level metrics such as network diameter and clustering coefficient are relatively stable. There have been some attempts to explain these properties of empirical social networks using agent-based models in which agents play social dilemma games with their immediate neighbours, but can also manipulate their network connections to
strategic advantage. However, such models cannot straightforwardly account for reciprocal behaviour based on reputation scores ("indirect reciprocity"), which is known to play an important role in many economic interactions. In
order to account for indirect reciprocity, we model the network in a bottom-up fashion: the network emerges from the low-level interactions between agents. By so doing we are able to simultaneously account for the effect of both direct reciprocity (e.g. "tit-for-tat") as well as indirect
reciprocity (helping strangers in order to increase one's reputation). This leads to a strategic equilibrium in the frequencies with which strategies are adopted in the population as a whole, but intermittent cycling over different strategies at the level of individual agents, which in turn gives rise to social networks which
are dynamic at the individual level but stable at the network level
Simulating Evolutionary Games: A Python-Based Introduction
This paper is an introduction to agent-based simulation using the Python programming language. The core objective of the paper is to enable students, teachers, and researchers immediately to begin social-science simulation projects in a general purpose programming language. This objective is facilitated by design features of the Python programming language, which we very briefly discuss. The paper has a 'tutorial' component, in that it is enablement-focused and therefore strongly application-oriented. As our illustrative application, we choose a classic agent-based simulation model: the evolutionary iterated prisoner's dilemma. We show how to simulate the iterated prisoner's dilemma with code that is simple and readable yet flexible and easily extensible. Despite the simplicity of the code, it constitutes a useful and easily extended simulation toolkit. We offer three examples of this extensibility: we explore the classic result that topology matters for evolutionary outcomes, we show how player type evolution is affected by payoff cardinality, and we show that strategy evaluation procedures can affect strategy persistence. Social science students and instructors should find that this paper provides adequate background to immediately begin their own simulation projects. Social science researchers will additionally be able to compare the simplicity, readability, and extensibility of the Python code with comparable simulations in other languages.Agent-Based Simulation, Python, Prisoner's Dilemma
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