Self-organized institutions in evolutionary dynamical-systems game

TL;DR

This paper introduces an evolutionary dynamical-systems game framework to model how social institutions emerge and stabilize through the interaction of ecological dynamics and decision-making, providing insights into the self-organization of norms.

Contribution

It presents a minimal model demonstrating how norms and institutions self-organize from environmental and social interactions within a coupled ecological and decision-making system.

Findings

Emergence of stable norms classifying actions as cooperative, defective, or punitive.

Convergence of system states to distinct limit-cycle modes.

Robustness of institutions despite variations in decision-making strategies.

Abstract

Social institutions are systems of shared norms and rules that regulate people's behaviors, often emerging without external enforcement. They provide criteria to distinguish cooperation from defection and establish rules to sustain cooperation, shaped through long-term trial and error. While principles for successful institutions have been proposed, the mechanisms underlying their emergence remain poorly understood. Here, we introduce the evolutionary dynamical-systems game, a framework that couples game actions with environmental dynamics and explores the evolution of cognitive frameworks for decision-making. We analyze a minimal model of common-pool resource management, where resources grow naturally and are harvested. Players use decision-making functions to determine whether to harvest at each step, based on environmental and peer monitoring. As these functions evolve, players detect selfish harvesting and punish it by degrading the environment through harvesting. This process leads to the self-organization of norms that classify harvesting actions as cooperative, defective, or punitive. The emergent norms for ``cooperativeness'' and rules of punishment serve as institutions. The environmental and players' states converge to distinct modes characterized by limit-cycles, representing temporal regularities in socio-ecological systems. These modes remain stable despite slight variations in decision-making, illustrating the stability of institutions. The evolutionary robustness of decision-making functions serves as a measure of the evolutionary favorability of institutions, highlighting the role of plasticity in responding to diverse opponents. This work introduces foundational concepts in evolutionary dynamical-systems games and elucidates the mechanisms underlying the self-organization of institutions by modeling the interplay between ecological dynamics and human decision-making.