Humans and other animals often follow the decisions made by others because these are indicative of the quality of possible choices, resulting in `social response rules': observed relationships between the probability that an agent will make a specific choice and the decisions other individuals have made. The form of social responses can be understood by considering the behaviour of rational agents that seek to maximise their expected utility using both social and private information. Previous derivations of social responses assume that agents observe all others within a group, but real interaction networks are often characterised by sparse connectivity. Here I analyse the observable behaviour of rational agents that attend to the decisions made by a subset of others in the group. This reveals an adaptive strategy in sparsely-connected networks based on highly-simplified social information: the difference in the observed number of agents choosing each option. Where agents employ this strategy, collective outcomes and decision-making efficacy are controlled by the social connectivity at the time of the decision, rather than that to which the agents are accustomed, providing an important caveat for sociality observed in the laboratory and suggesting a basis for the social dynamics of highly-connected online communities.
翻译:人类和其他动物往往遵循他人做出的决定,因为这些决定表明了可能的选择的质量,从而产生了“社会反应规则”:观察到一个代理人作出具体选择的可能性与其他个人所作决定之间的关系; 可以通过考虑那些试图利用社会和私人信息最大限度地发挥预期效用的合理代理人的行为来理解社会反应的形式; 社会反应的先前推论假定,代理人在一个群体内观察所有其他人,但真正的互动网络往往缺乏连通性; 在这里,我分析了参与该群体中一部分人所作决定的理性代理人的可见行为; 这揭示了在高度简单化的社会信息基础上,在稀少的网络上采取的适应性战略:所观察到的选定每种选择的代理人人数的差异; 当代理人采用这一战略时,集体结果和决策效力由决策时的社会联系而不是代理人习惯的社会联系加以控制,为实验室所观察到的社会性提供了重要的洞察点,并为高度连接的在线社区的社会动态提供了基础。