Self-induced class stratification in competitive societies of agents: Nash stability in the presence of envy
- Envy, the inclination to compare rewards, can be expected to unfold when inequalities in terms of pay-off differences are generated in competitive societies. It is shown that increasing levels of envy lead inevitably to a self-induced separation into a lower and an upper class. Class stratification is Nash stable and strict, with members of the same class receiving identical rewards. Upper-class agents play exclusively pure strategies, all lower-class agents the same mixed strategy. The fraction of upper-class agents decreases progressively with larger levels of envy, until a single upper-class agent is left. Numerical simulations and a complete analytic treatment of a basic reference model, the shopping trouble model, are presented. The properties of the class-stratified society are universal and only indirectly controllable through the underlying utility function, which implies that class-stratified societies are intrinsically resistant to political control. Implications for human societies are discussed. It is pointed out that the repercussions of envy are amplified when societies become increasingly competitive.
Author: | Claudius GrosORCiDGND |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-542458 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.200411 |
ISSN: | 2054-5703 |
Parent Title (English): | Royal Society Open Science |
Publisher: | Royal Soc. Publ. |
Place of publication: | London |
Document Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Year of Completion: | 2020 |
Date of first Publication: | 2020/06/17 |
Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
Release Date: | 2020/06/24 |
Tag: | class separation; game theory; social modelling; social stratification |
Volume: | 7 |
Issue: | 6, Art. 200411 |
Page Number: | 15 |
First Page: | 1 |
Last Page: | 15 |
Note: | Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
HeBIS-PPN: | 467349800 |
Institutes: | Physik / Physik |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 53 Physik / 530 Physik |
Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
Open-Access-Publikationsfonds: | Physik |
Licence (German): | ![]() |