TY - JOUR
T1 - The coevolution of group size and leadership
T2 - An agent-based public goods model for prehispanic pueblo societies
AU - Kohler, Timothy A.
AU - Cockburn, Denton
AU - Hooper, Paul L.
AU - Bocinsky, R. Kyle
AU - Kobti, Ziad
N1 - Funding Information:
of many other past and current members of the VEP research team, especially Mark Varien and Scott Ortman of Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. Thanks to Herb Maschner, Scott Ortman, and an anonymous reviewer for comments on an earlier version. Hillard Kaplan and Jim Boone also provided helpful input. Stefani Crabtree produced Fig. 1, and Ruth Van Dyke provided a crucial reference. Our research is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant DEB-0816400.
PY - 2012/3
Y1 - 2012/3
N2 - We present an agent-based model for voluntaristic processes allowing the emergence of leadership in small-scale societies, parameterized to apply to Pueblo societies of the northern US Southwest between AD 600 and 1300. We embed an evolutionary public-goods game in a spatial simulation of household activities in which agents, representing households, decide where to farm, hunt, and locate their residences. Leaders, through their work in monitoring group members and punishing defectors, can increase the likelihood that group members will cooperate to achieve a favorable outcome in the public-goods game. We show that under certain conditions households prefer to work in a group with a leader who receives a share of the group's productivity, rather than to work in a group with no leader. Simulation produces outcomes that match reasonably well those known for a portion of Southwest Colorado between AD 600 and 900. We suggest that for later periods a model incorporating coercion, or inter-group competition, or both, and one in which tiered hierarchies of leadership can emerge, would increase the goodness-of-fit.
AB - We present an agent-based model for voluntaristic processes allowing the emergence of leadership in small-scale societies, parameterized to apply to Pueblo societies of the northern US Southwest between AD 600 and 1300. We embed an evolutionary public-goods game in a spatial simulation of household activities in which agents, representing households, decide where to farm, hunt, and locate their residences. Leaders, through their work in monitoring group members and punishing defectors, can increase the likelihood that group members will cooperate to achieve a favorable outcome in the public-goods game. We show that under certain conditions households prefer to work in a group with a leader who receives a share of the group's productivity, rather than to work in a group with no leader. Simulation produces outcomes that match reasonably well those known for a portion of Southwest Colorado between AD 600 and 900. We suggest that for later periods a model incorporating coercion, or inter-group competition, or both, and one in which tiered hierarchies of leadership can emerge, would increase the goodness-of-fit.
KW - Agent-based simulation
KW - Emergence of leadership
KW - Neolithic societies
KW - Public-goods games
KW - Pueblo society
KW - Southwestern Colorado
KW - Southwestern archaeology
KW - Spatial simulation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84858164817&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1142/S0219525911003256
DO - 10.1142/S0219525911003256
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84858164817
SN - 0219-5259
VL - 15
JO - Advances in Complex Systems
JF - Advances in Complex Systems
IS - 1-2
M1 - 1150007
ER -