In this paper, we study the effect of demand on specialization of skilled agents by modifying the earlier hybrid model which is based on the well-known Genetic Threshold Model (GTM) and Social Inhibition Model (SIM). We improve the agent specialization or division of labor (DOL) and also the quality of work (QOW) by introducing a new concept of varying the demand on a smooth curve and compare o...

Divisions of labor are ubiquitous in nature and can be found at nearly every level of biological organization, from the individuals of a shared society to the cells of a single multicellular organism. Many different types of microbes have also evolved a division of labor among its colony members. Here we review several examples of microbial divisions of labor, including cases from both multicel...

A customary gender division of labor is one in which women and men are directed towards certain tasks and/or explicitly prohibited from performing others. We offer an explanation as to why the gender division of labor is so often enforced by custom, and why customary gender divisions of labor generally involve both direction and prohibition. Our model builds on the literature on the marital hol...

Sexual reproductive behavior has a necessary social coordination component as willing and capable partners must both be in the right place at the right time. It has recently been demonstrated that many social organizations that support sexual reproduction can evolve in the absence of social coordination between agents (e.g. herding, assortative mating, and natal philopatry). In this paper we ex...

In this paper, a distributed algorithm for adaptive task allocation and adaptable partitioning of a swarm into different work-groups is proposed and used in a swarm of underwater robots. The algorithm is based on local interactions of agents and is inspired by honeybee age-polyethism. It is adaptive to changes in the swarm size (workforce) and relative demands (workload) for different tasks and...

Social insects provide us with a powerful metaphor to create decentralized systems of simple interacting, and often mobile, agents. The emergent collective intelligence of social insects – swarm intelligence – resides not in complex individual abilities but rather in networks of interactions that exist among individuals and between individuals and their environment. In particular, a recently pr...

Using data collected from qualitative interviews in 36 households, this article examines people's use of social relations based on gender to perform tasks associated with residential relocation in later life. Without prompting, our respondents addressed the social relations of gender in the meanings of things, in the persons of gift recipients, and in the persons of actors accomplishing the tas...

This paper considers how identity, a person’s sense of self, affects economic outcomes. We incorporate the psychology and sociology of identity into an economic model of behavior. In the utility function we propose, identity is associated with different social categories and how people in these categories should behave. We then construct a simple game-theoretic model showing how identity can af...