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Understanding Norm Change: An Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Approach

Published: 08 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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  • (2019)Outcome-based Partner Selection in Collective Risk DilemmasProceedings of the 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3306127.3331873(1556-1564)Online publication date: 8-May-2019
  • (2018)Initial Results from an Agent-Based Simulation of Housing in Urban BeirutProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3237383.3238066(2045-2047)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2018
  • (2018)On Collusion and CoercionProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3237383.3237940(1622-1630)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2018
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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
AAMAS '17: Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems
May 2017
1914 pages

Sponsors

  • IFAAMAS

In-Cooperation

Publisher

International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

Richland, SC

Publication History

Published: 08 May 2017

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Author Tags

  1. agent-based analysis of human interactions
  2. emergent behavior
  3. evolutionary algorithms

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • U.S. Air Force

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AAMAS '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 127 of 457 submissions, 28%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,155 of 5,036 submissions, 23%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2019)Outcome-based Partner Selection in Collective Risk DilemmasProceedings of the 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3306127.3331873(1556-1564)Online publication date: 8-May-2019
  • (2018)Initial Results from an Agent-Based Simulation of Housing in Urban BeirutProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3237383.3238066(2045-2047)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2018
  • (2018)On Collusion and CoercionProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3237383.3237940(1622-1630)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2018
  • (2018)Off-line synthesis of evolutionarily stable normative systemsAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-018-9390-332:5(635-671)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2018

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