title: Fashion, cooperation, and social interactions.
abstract: Fashion plays such a crucial rule in the evolution of culture and society that it is regarded as a second nature to the human being. Also, its impact on economy is quite nontrivial. On what is fashionable, interestingly, there are two viewpoints that are both extremely widespread but almost opposite: conformists think that what is popular is fashionable, while rebels believe that being different is the essence. Fashion color is fashionable in the first sense, and Lady Gaga in the second. We investigate a model where the population consists of the afore-mentioned two groups of people that are located on social networks (a spatial cellular automata network and small-world networks). This model captures two fundamental kinds of social interactions (coordination and anti-coordination) simultaneously, and also has its own interest to game theory: it is a hybrid model of pure competition and pure cooperation. This is true because when a conformist meets a rebel, they play the zero sum matching pennies game, which is pure competition. When two conformists (rebels) meet, they play the (anti-) coordination game, which is pure cooperation. Simulation shows that simple social interactions greatly promote cooperation: in most cases people can reach an extraordinarily high level of cooperation, through a selfish, myopic, naive, and local interacting dynamic (the best response dynamic). We find that degree of synchronization also plays a critical role, but mostly on the negative side. Four indices, namely cooperation degree, average satisfaction degree, equilibrium ratio and complete ratio, are defined and applied to measure people's cooperation levels from various angles. Phase transition, as well as emergence of many interesting geographic patterns in the cellular automata network, is also observed.
authors: Key Laboratory of Management, Decision & Information Systems, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. zhigangcao@amss.ac.cn
authors: Zhigang
authors: Z
authors: Cao
authors: Haoyu
authors: H
authors: Gao
authors: Xinglong
authors: X
authors: Qu
authors: Mingmin
authors: M
authors: Yang
authors: Xiaoguang
authors: X
authors: Yang
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D003469:Culture; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations
references: Nature. 1998 Jun 4;393(6684):440-2
references: 9623998
references: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009 Dec 22;106(51):21544-9
references: 20007780
references: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 Apr 30;99(9):5766-71
references: 16578874
references: PLoS One. 2008 Jan 23;3(1):e1458
references: 18213367
references: Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2012 May;85(5 Pt 2):056210
references: 23004846
references: Phys Rev Lett. 2011 Feb 4;106(5):054102
references: 21405399
references: PLoS One. 2012;7(3):e32541
references: 22412887
references: Science. 1999 Oct 15;286(5439):509-12
references: 10521342
references: Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2011 Oct;84(4 Pt 2):046202
references: 22181240