A spatial agent-based model of social relationality: emergent cooperation and leadership in community development

Power, Conrad (2014) A spatial agent-based model of social relationality: emergent cooperation and leadership in community development. Doctoral (PhD) thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

The main objective of this research is to develop a spatially explicit agentbased model that simulates emergent cooperation and leadership in the context of complex community development. Formalization of the framework is founded on the postulate that cooperation and complexity leadership emerge from the non-linear behaviours of mobile affective agents as they participate in social interactions. The architecture is an object-oriented system of components that model mobility, social communication, psychological state, labour market dynamics, leadership, and evolutionary learning. As an approximation of real world decision-making, agents have an affective state derived from a psychological model that influences their participation and response to the outcomes of social interactions. The spatial context of these social interactions is based on the mobility dynamics of individuals as they probabilistically select an everyday activity in reference to their demographic states and expected payoff structure associated with potential neighbours. Social interactions are classified according to the type of neighbourhood required for its social network: (1) a grouping of multiple agents at a shared location, or (2) a directed pairing of employee-firm traders engaged in a labour market transaction. Social interactions in multiple agent neighbourhoods are simulated as N-Person's Prisoner's Dilemma games, where the action choices of the citizens are determined from the degree of relationality and trust within the social network. Labour market transactions are interactions between an employee and a firm who are paired with a preferential partnership matching mechanism. These directed social exchanges are modeled as two person's Iterative Prisoner's Dilemma games. Self-organizing leadership is conditioned on the tensions endemic in the Prisoner's Dilemma and the tensions purposely introduced during knowledge diffusion by the administrative leaders. The localized and overall cooperation and defection leaders are identified by the magnitude of their reward, and are tagged as the most successful individuals within the environment. The unsatisfied agents survive by adopting the action strategy of their highest paid neighbour implemented with a social mimicry mechanism. A form of steady state cooperation in a spatial environment depends on the citizens behaving in a comparable altruistic manner by making affective decisions with similar action strategies.

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