2017/04/16 by Soham De, Dana S. Nau, Dana Nau +4
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Evolution and Genetic Dynamics #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #cs.CY #cs.GT #cs.MA #cs.SI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1704.04720
In 2017 International Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems (AAMAS)
arxiv created 2017/04/16 · openalex publication_date 2017/04/16 · arxiv updated 2017/04/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Human societies around the world interact with each other by developing and maintaining social norms, and it is critically important to understand how such norms emerge and change. In this work, we define an evolutionary game-theoretic model to study how norms change in a society, based on the idea that different strength of norms in societies translate to different game-theoretic interaction structures and incentives. We use this model to study, both analytically and with extensive agent-based simulations, the evolutionary relationships of the need for coordination in a society (which is related to its norm strength) with two key aspects of norm change: cultural inertia (whether or how quickly the population responds when faced with conditions that make a norm change desirable), and exploration rate (the willingness of agents to try out new strategies). Our results show that a high need for coordination leads to both high cultural inertia and a low exploration rate, while a low need for coordination leads to low cultural inertia and high exploration rate. This is the first work, to our knowledge, on understanding the evolutionary causal relationships among these factors.