Abstract
Observable social traits determine how we interact meaningfully in society even in our globalized world. While a popular hypothesis states that observable traits may help promote cooperation, the alternative explanation that they facilitate coordination has gained ground in recent years. Here we explore this possibility and present a model that investigates the role of ethnic markers in coordination games. In particular, we aim to test the role of reinforcement learning as the microscopic mechanism used by the agents to update their strategies in the game. For a wide range of parameters, we observe the emergence of a collective equilibrium in which markers play an assorting role. However, if individuals are too conformist or too greedy, markers fail to shape social interactions. These results extend and complement previous work focused on agent imitation and show that reinforcement learning is a good candidate to explain many instances where ethnic markers influence coordination.
Highlights
Observable social traits determine how we interact meaningfully in society even in our globalized world
We investigated reinforcement learning in a model for the emergence of marker-related behaviour in coordination problems, showing that it can provide a mechanism in order to solve such multi-agent coordination games
It is interesting to consider our work in relation to the pioneering proposal by McElreath et al.[9], which did not consider reinforcement learning but rather imitation-driven dynamics
Summary
Observable social traits determine how we interact meaningfully in society even in our globalized world. While a popular hypothesis states that observable traits may help promote cooperation, the alternative explanation that they facilitate coordination has gained ground in recent years We explore this possibility and present a model that investigates the role of ethnic markers in coordination games. If individuals are too conformist or too greedy, markers fail to shape social interactions These results extend and complement previous work focused on agent imitation and show that reinforcement learning is a good candidate to explain many instances where ethnic markers influence coordination. We work in the framework introduced by McElreath et al.[9] consisting of a unique binary marker used by individuals to choose their behavior in social interactions This characterization of strangers based on ethnic markers is used to determine whether or not there are shared social norms with them[16,17]. This parameter defines how the outcome of an interaction makes it more likely to choose a given action in the future, when the payoff it yields is larger than the aspiration
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