Social and strategic imitation: the way to consensus

Daniele Vilone1, José J. Ramasco1, Ángel Sánchez2,3 and Maxi San Miguel1
1Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos IFISC (CSIC-UIB), Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
2Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos (GISC), Departamento de Matemáticas, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 28911 Leganés, Spain.
3Instituto de Biocomputación y Física de Sistemas Complejos (BIFI), Universidad de Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain.

(July 2012)

Humans do not always make rational choices, a fact that experimental economics is putting on solid grounds. The social context plays an important role in determining our actions, and often we imitate friends or acquaintances without any strategic consideration. We explore here the interplay between strategic and social imitative behaviors in a coordination problem on a social network. We observe that for interactions in 1D and 2D lattices any amount of social imitation prevents the freezing of the network in domains with different conventions, thus leading to global consensus. For interactions in complex networks, the interplay of social and strategic imitation also drives the system towards global consensus while neither dynamics alone does. We find an optimum value for the combination of imitative behaviors to reach consensus in a minimum time, and two different dynamical regimes to approach it: exponential when social imitation predominates, and power-law when strategic considerations dominate.

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