Self organization of social hierarchy and clusters in a challenging society with free random walks

Ryo Fujie and Takashi Odagaki

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2010, vol. 389, issue 7, 1471-1479

Abstract: Emergence of social hierarchy and clusters in a challenging equal-right society is studied on the basis of the agent-based model, where warlike individuals who have own power or wealth perform random walks in a random order on a lattice and when meeting others the individuals challenge the strongest among the neighbors. We assume that the winning probability depends on the difference in their wealth and after the fight the winner gets and the loser loses a unit of the wealth. We show that hierarchy is self organized when the population exceeds a critical value and the transition from egalitarian state to hierarchical state occurs in two steps. The first transition is continuous to the society with widespread winning-probability. At the second transition the variance of the winning fraction decrease discontinuously, which was not observed in previous studies. The second hierarchical society consists of a small number of extreme winners and many individuals in the middle class and losers. We also show that when the relaxation parameter for the wealth is large, the first transition disappears. In the second hierarchical society, a giant cluster of individuals is formed with a layered structure in the power order and some people stray around it. The structure of the cluster and the distribution of wealth are quite different from the results of the previous challenging model [M. Tsujiguchi and T. Odagaki, Physica A 375 (2007) 317] which adopts the preassigned order for random walk.

Keywords: Self-organization; Hierarchy; Phase transition; Social structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:389:y:2010:i:7:p:1471-1479

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2009.11.042

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