Abstract
Understanding human institutions, animal cultures and other social systems requires flexible formalisms that describe how their members change them from within. We introduce a framework for modelling how agents change the games they participate in. We contrast this between-game ‘institutional evolution’ with the more familiar within-game ‘behavioural evolution’. We model institutional change by following small numbers of persistent agents as they select and play a changing series of games. Starting from an initial game, a group of agents trace trajectories through game space by navigating to increasingly preferable games until they converge on ‘attractor’ games. Agents use their ‘institutional preferences' for game features (such as stability, fairness and efficiency) to choose between neighbouring games. We use this framework to pose a pressing question: what kinds of games does institutional evolution select for; what is in the attractors? After computing institutional change trajectories over the two-player space, we find that attractors have disproportionately fair outcomes, even though the agents who produce them are strictly self-interested and indifferent to fairness. This seems to occur because game fairness co-occurs with the self-serving features these agents do actually prefer. We thus present institutional evolution as a mechanism for encouraging the spontaneous emergence of cooperation among small groups of inherently selfish agents, without space, reputation, repetition, or other more familiar mechanisms. Game space trajectories provide a flexible, testable formalism for modelling the interdependencies of behavioural and institutional evolutionary processes, as well as a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation.
Highlights
Evolutionary game theory has proved valuable for analysing cooperation in a wide variety of biological and social systems
The interactions that structure our daily lives are not randomly selected from the space of social systems, nor from the small subset of games, such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Stag Hunt, that have proved most useful for illustrating theoretical distinctions
Compared to panel (a), the institutional evolutionary process doubles the chances that a randomly drawn game will be a win–win game, even though the selfish agents driving it have no explicit preferences for mutually beneficial games. (Online version in colour.)
Summary
Evolutionary game theory has proved valuable for analysing cooperation in a wide variety of biological and social systems. Research in this tradition often uses game spaces to catalogue the variety of within-game dynamics [15,16,17,18,19] These theoretical and experimental studies parallel an increasing amount of observational work based upon comparisons across large numbers of social systems [20,21,22,23]. A framework introduced by Hurwicz, for example, chains several games together to model an institution’s development along with its outcomes [3] In another approach to cross-game behavioural evolution, games are arranged in a series to induce learning experiences that steer agents towards specific outcomes [27]. Its simplicity and structure make it an ideal substrate for modelling the processes of institutional evolution (figure 1b) [39]
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