Collective strategy condensation: when envy splits societies

  • Human societies are characterized by three constituent features, besides others. (A) Options, as for jobs and societal positions, differ with respect to their associated monetary and non-monetary payoffs. (B) Competition leads to reduced payoffs when individuals compete for the same option as others. (C) People care about how they are doing relatively to others. The latter trait –the propensity to compare one’s own success with that of others– expresses itself as envy. It is shown that the combination of (A)–(C) leads to spontaneous class stratification. Societies of agents split endogenously into two social classes, an upper and a lower class, when envy becomes relevant. A comprehensive analysis of the Nash equilibria characterizing a basic reference game is presented. Class separation is due to the condensation of the strategies of lower-class agents, which play an identical mixed strategy. Upper-class agents do not condense, following individualist pure strategies. The model and results are size-consistent, holding for arbitrary large numbers of agents and options. Analytic results are confirmed by extensive numerical simulations. An analogy to interacting confined classical particles is discussed.

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Metadaten
Author:Claudius GrosORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-574481
DOI:https://doi.org/10.3390/e23020157
ISSN:1099-4300
Parent Title (German):Entropy
Publisher:MDPI
Place of publication:Basel
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2021/01/27
Date of first Publication:2021/01/27
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2021/01/28
Tag:complex systems; envy; game theory; nash equilibrium; phase transition; self-organization; social classes; sociophysics; strategy condensation
Volume:23
Issue:Article 157
Page Number:10
HeBIS-PPN:476946980
Institutes:Physik / Physik
Dewey Decimal Classification:5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 53 Physik / 530 Physik
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Open-Access-Publikationsfonds:Physik
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0