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Social Welfare on the Sugarscape and Its Paradox. Li Wang Ross School of Business University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI . How to Measure the Social Welfare?. Social Welfare on the Sugarscape: It measures how well artificial agents can coexist on the sugarscape
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Social Welfare on the Sugarscape and Its Paradox Li Wang Ross School of Business University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI
How to Measure the Social Welfare? • Social Welfare on the Sugarscape: • It measures how well artificial agents can coexist on the sugarscape • Under the same conditions (sugar growth rate, environment conditions, agent vision, agent metabolism,…), different behaviors of individual agents and social norms might significantly affect social welfare • “Carrying Capacity” can be a good indicator of social welfare • It is the number of agents that eventually survive on the sugarscape • Maximal value:
What behaviors might improve Social Welfare? • Collaboration: • Sharing information: before an agent moves to the best location, it shares with its current neighbors what it saw => improving its neighbors’ vision • Social responsibility: the richest neighbor of a starving agent donates some sugar to help it survive. • There is no need for “lenders” to remember who the “borrowers” are. • It is not simply the interaction between individuals, but the interaction between individual and society. • Law enforcement: • It makes a more civilized society • Example: • Taxation: agents pay tax according to their wealth (sugar) and the tax income is used to help starving agents survive.
What behaviors might improve Social Welfare? – Cont. • Introducing centralization: • Example: Agents can be randomly divided into small groups. Agents in the same group can hunt and consume sugar together. • Penalizing sugar collecting: • Idea: There are enough sugar to support a larger society. Some agents are starved to die, because some others are too smart. By penalizing the smart ones, social welfare gets improved. • Simplest and easiest way to improve social welfare • A decentralized approach • Previous methods have higher cost, because they require centralization and/or coordination mechanism • Example: • When an agent has amassed a certain level of wealth, its vision is impaired
Penalizing sugar collection • Code: to M ; Motion rule ; vision range 1-6 ……. ifelse (sugar > 400) [ifelse ( vision > 2) [set vision vision - 2] [set vision 1] ] [ifelse ( sugar > 200) [ifelse ( vision > 1) [set vision vision - 1] [set vision 1] ] [if ( sugar < 50) [ifelse ( vision < 6) [set vision vision + 1] [set vision 6] ] ] ] set neighborhood make-neighborhood vision …… end
Result Original Model Modified Model • Interesting Observation: In the modified model, the average vision decreases, but the number of survived agents significantly increases. • Paradox for social welfare on the Sugarscape: intelligent agents destroy social welfare and it is dumb agents who can save the world.