Emergence of Cooperation with Stationary Leaders
In the scope of the course “Agent-Based Modeling and Social System Simulation”, together with my teammates Jens Hunhevicz, Sophie Kerstan and Jonas Stolle, we investigated the factors that contributes to the emergence of cooperation in competitive environments. In particular, the main focus was on the effect of leadership in uniting agents towards a “common good”.
The statements that our species’ evolutionary success can be attributed largely to the ability and willingness to cooperate and that this is one of the most puzzling mechanisms inhuman and natural systems are definite. However, cooperation is a many-faceted phenomenon and from an evolutionary game theory perspective not as self-evident as our everyday experiences and the long list of conceivable real-world examples may suggest. Due to the mismatch between this theorization and real-world occurrences, research has investigated mechanisms that enable the outburst, spread and preservation of cooperative behavior. Despite these efforts, the nature of cooperation is not yet fully understood. Partly, this is because the number of potentially relevant parameters is vast. As a result, there is still room to experiment with existing findings and examine the impact of certain single factors as well as their combinatory effects.
While imitation and migration have been widely recognized as mechanism, the specific construct and potential relevance of leadership has been added to the discussion more recently. Leaders can be seen as role models, showing exemplary behavior, which might eventually be copied by followers. This model studies the effects that such leadership may have on the emergence of cooperation in a competitive scenario. Exemplary real world cases would be e.g geographic places that attract talent and create hubs of cooperation, e.g. the Silicon Valley.
The simulations, developed and run on MATLAB, guided us towards some very interesting final conclusions, that were eventually collected in a final report, openly available to anyone, together with the source code.
If you are interested in knowing more, the source code relative to this project and a brief report are available at the following link: |
