Abstract
Social Instruments for Robust Convention Emergence
Daniel Villatoro, Jordi Sabater-Mir, Sandip Sen
We present the notion of Social Instruments as mechanisms that facilitate the emergence of conventions from repeated interactions between members of a society. Specifically, we focus on two social instruments: rewiring and observation. Our main goal is to provide agents with tools that allow them to leverage their social network of interactions when effectively addressing coordination and learning problems, paying special attention to dissolving meta-stable subconventions. Initial experiments throw some light on how Self-Reinforcing Substructures (SRS) in the network prevent full convergence, resulting in reduced convergence rates. The use of an effective composed social instrument (observation + rewiring) allow agents to eliminate the subconventions that otherwise remained meta-stable.