Strategies of Voting in Stochastic Environment: Egoism and Collectivism

TL;DR

This paper models social decision-making in stochastic environments, comparing egoism and collectivism, and finds collectivist strategies generally outperform egoist ones, influencing group dynamics and manipulation resistance.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic model of social dynamics with collective decision-making, analyzing the comparative utility of egoism versus collectivism and their impact on group behavior.

Findings

Collectivists generally have advantages over egoists.

Group egoism can approach altruism through success-driven attraction.

A variant of collectivism reduces manipulation by organizers.

Abstract

Consideration was given to a model of social dynamics controlled by successive collective decisions based on the threshold majority procedures. The current system state is characterized by the vector of participants' capitals (utilities). At each step, the voters can either retain their status quo or accept the proposal which is a vector of the algebraic increments in the capitals of the participants. In this version of the model, the vector is generated stochastically. Comparative utility of two social attitudes--egoism and collectivism--was analyzed. It was established that, except for some special cases, the collectivists have advantages, which makes realizable the following scenario: on the conditions of protecting the corporate interests, a group is created which is joined then by the egoists attracted by its achievements. At that, group egoism approaches altruism. Additionally, one of the considered variants of collectivism handicaps manipulation of voting by the organizers.