How social structure and institutional order co-evolve beyond instrumental rationality

ABSTRACT

This study proposes an agent-based model where adaptively learning agents with local vision who are situated in the Prisoner's Dilemma game change their strategy and location as well. Besides both the copying-highest-scoring strategy and the tie dissolution among defectors as the instrumental rationale, two other heuristics are considered: following-the-majority in the influence process; and the tie dissociation between cooperators and defectors in the selection process. Under the overall setting which is not favorable to cooperation, it turned out that cooperative culture is less likely to emerge and its transmission is more unstable when more agents stick to follow the trend on the fixed network. Given the same set of conditions but with the small amount of social plasticity, cooperative culture is much more likely to emerge and sustain on a hierarchical network where the average clustering coefficient is higher and the average path length is still similar compared to those of the equivalent random network when the small degree of freedom from defectors is allowed to defectors only; much higher and slightly longer, respectively, when cooperators also have that freedom.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  J. Computer Applications
  J.4 SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
      Subjects: Sociology

General Terms:
Algorithms

Keywords:
coordination, emergent order, emergent structure, homophily, instrumental rationale, netlogo, prisoner's dilemma game