Evolutionary Game-theoretic Modeling of Past Societies’ Organization Structure

In this work, we extend a generic agent-based model for simulating ancient societies, by blending, for the first time, evolutionary game theory with multiagent systems’ self-organization. Our approach models the evolution of social behaviours in a population of strategically interacting agents corresponding to households in the early Minoan era. To this end, agents participate in repeated games by means of which they exchange utility (corresponding to resources) with others. The results of the games contribute to both the continuous re-organization of the social structure, and the progressive adoption of the most successful agent strategies. Agent population is not fixed, but fluctuates over time. The particularity of the domain necessitates that agents in our games receive non-static payoffs, in contrast to most games studied in the literature; and that the evolutionary dynamics are formulated via assessing the perceived fitness of the agents, defined in terms of how successful they are in accumulating utility. We present a systematic evaluation of the performance of the various strategies, assuming several variations in the way agent fitness and agent organization fitness are defined, as well as in the way agents adopt new strategies. Overall, our results show that societies of strategic agents that self-organize via adopting the aforementioned evolutionary approach, demonstrate a sustainability that largely matches that of self-organizing societies of more cooperative agents; and that strategic cooperation is in fact, in many instances, an emergent behaviour in this domain. Our approach can provide intuitions to archaeological research, and help resolve open questions regarding the socio-economic dynamics at work in past societies.