Composition of Games as a Model for the Evolution of Social Institutions

Andras, Peter

Abstract

The evolution of social institutions (e.g. institutions of political decision making or joint resource administration) is an important question in the context of understanding of how societies develop and evolve. In principle, social institutions can be conceptualized as abstract games with multiple players and rules about individual decision making and individual and joint outcomes. Here we propose a formal approach for the composition of games (e.g. Prisoner's Dilemma – PD) to model the evolution of social institutions. Following a generalized description of the approach, we describe two examples of application for the composition of PD games. We assess the impact of the composed games on the level of cooperation. We discuss the implications of the proposed approach and how it may help to develop effective models of social institution evolution.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (Published)
• Conference Name: ALIFE 2020: The 2020 Conference on Artificial Life
• Start Date: Jul 13, 2020
• End Date: Jul 18, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Jul 1, 2020
• Publication Date: 2020
• Deposit Date: Nov 16, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 16, 2021
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Pages: 171-179
• Book Title: Artificial Life Conference Proceedings
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/isal_a_00264
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2809289