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

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.

Cost-efficiency of institutional reward and punishment in cooperation dilemmas

“…We have summarized a recent theoretical analysis of the problem of optimizing cost of institutional incentives (for both reward and punishment) while guaranteeing a minimum amount of cooperation, in stochastic finite populations. In this context, institutional approaches have been widely adopted to study biological and artificial life systems (Andras et al, 2018;Jones et al, 2013;Smaldino and Lubell, 2014;Perret et al, 2019;Andras, 2020). This analysis provides new, fundamental insights into a cost-efficient design of institution-based solutions for promoting pro-social behaviours in social and artificial systems.…”