A study on the emergence of Power systems in artificial Societies.

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The main results of this research project are as follows. I examined the idea that social power emerges from a network of social exchange. Here, strong power is considered to be the agent's ability to gain others' cooperation without giving others its own cooperation. Suppose a situation where a set of agents are engaged in social exchange of cooperation among them. The agents, who are successful in gaining much cooperation from others through exchange, can manipulate strong coalitions and become powerful because they can punish others more effectively. If they have attained a reputation as strong, they can get cooperation from weaker others without giving their cooperation to others including their ex-exchange-partners. It is because weaker agents cannot resist strong ones, and because, if weaker agents give cooperation to weak agents, they may be punished by strong agents. Computer-aided thought experiments demonstrated that such notion worked fairly well.Besides the above analysis, I also conducted the computer simulation analyzes, whose focuses were on the emergence of exchange norms, the emergence of agents' clustering patterns, and the emergence of selective inclusion mechanisms which facilitate cooperation in Social Dilemma situations.