Game theory in models of pedestrian room evacuation

We analyze the pedestrian evacuation of a rectangular room with a single door considering a Lattice Gas scheme with the addition of behavioral aspects of the pedestrians. The movement of the individuals is based on random and rational choices and is affected by conflicts between two or more agents that want to advance to the same position. Such conflicts are solved according to certain rules closely related to the concept of strategies in Game Theory, cooperation and defection. We consider game rules analogous to those from the Prisoner's Dilemma and Stag Hunt games, with payoffs associated to the probabilities of the individuals to advance to the selected site. We find that, even when defecting is the rational choice for any agent, under certain conditions, cooperators can take advantage from mutual cooperation and leave the room more rapidly than defectors

Space use by foragers consuming renewable resources

We study a simple model of a forager as a walk that modifies a relaxing substrate. Within it simplicity, this provides an insight on a number of relevant and non-intuitive facts. Even without memory of the good places to feed and no explicit cost of moving, we observe the emergence of a finite home range. We characterize the walks and the use of resources in several statistical ways, involving the behavior of the average used fraction of the system, the length of the cycles followed by the walkers, and the frequency of visits to plants. Preliminary results on population effects are explored by means of a system of two non directly interacting animals. Properties of the overlap of home ranges show the existence of a set of parameters that provides the best utilization of the shared resource

Cultural propagation on social networks

In this work we present a model for the propagation of culture on networks of different topology and by considering different underlying dynamics. We extend a previous model proposed by Axelrod by letting a majority govern the dynamics of changes. This in turn allows us to define a Lyapunov functional for the system.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures include

Living in an Irrational Society: Wealth Distribution with Correlations between Risk and Expected Profits

Different models to study the wealth distribution in an artificial society have considered a transactional dynamics as the driving force. Those models include a risk aversion factor, but also a finite probability of favoring the poorer agent in a transaction. Here we study the case where the partners in the transaction have a previous knowledge of the winning probability and adjust their risk aversion taking this information into consideration. The results indicate that a relatively equalitarian society is obtained when the agents risk in direct proportion to their winning probabilities. However, it is the opposite case that delivers wealth distribution curves and Gini indices closer to empirical data. This indicates that, at least for this very simple model, either agents have no knowledge of their winning probabilities, either they exhibit an ``irrational'' behavior risking more than reasonable.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figure