Social and strategic imitation: the way to consensus

TL;DR

This paper investigates how social and strategic imitation influence consensus formation in networks, showing that their interplay facilitates global agreement and identifying optimal imitation balances for fastest convergence.

Contribution

It reveals that combining social and strategic imitation leads to consensus in various network types, a novel insight into collective decision dynamics.

Findings

Social imitation prevents domain freezing in lattices.

Combined imitation drives global consensus in complex networks.

Optimal imitation balance minimizes convergence time.

Abstract

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.