Abstract
Fairness has long been argued to govern human behavior in a wide range of social, economic, and organizational activities. The sense of fairness, although universal, varies across different societies. In this study, using a computational model, we test the hypothesis that the topology of social interaction can causally explain some of the cross-societal variations in fairness norms. We show that two network parameters, namely, community structure, as measured by the modularity index, and network hubiness, represented by the skewness of degree distribution, have the most significant impact on emergence of collective fair behavior. These two parameters can explain much of the variations in fairness norms across societies and can also be linked to hypotheses suggested by earlier empirical studies in social and organizational sciences. We devised a multi-layered model that combines local agent interactions with social learning, thus enables both strategic behavior as well as diffusion of successful strategies. By applying multivariate statistics on the results, we obtain the relation between network structural features and the collective fair behavior.
Highlights
The variations of fairness across societies have been largely attributed to cultural differences, yet interpretations have been mixed[16,17,18]
A series of studies that explored the motivation for fairness in anonymous interactions across dramatically diverse population show that fairness co-varies with Payoffs to Cooperation (PC) and Market Integration (MI) where PC represents the size of a group’s payoff from cooperation in economic production, and MI represents how much people rely on market exchange in their daily lives as opposed to rely on home-grown or hunted[8]
Our results identify three key structural features of social networks to explain the variation of fairness across different populations: average degree, community structure, and hubiness
Summary
The variations of fairness across societies have been largely attributed to cultural differences, yet interpretations have been mixed[16,17,18]. The proposer offers a split of the amount and the responder accepts or rejects. The results of a large number of experimental studies using the UG contradict with the prediction of pure rational models; most proposers offer a fair share and most responders reject low (but nonzero) offers[25,26,27]. Experimental studies based on the Ultimatum Game have reported significant cross-societal variations in average size of the offers by the proposers and the rejection rates by the responders. A series of studies that explored the motivation for fairness in anonymous interactions across dramatically diverse population show that fairness co-varies with Payoffs to Cooperation (PC) and Market Integration (MI) where PC represents the size of a group’s payoff from cooperation in economic production, and MI represents how much people rely on market exchange in their daily lives as opposed to rely on home-grown or hunted[8]
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