Patterns of Social Influence in a Network of Situated Cognitive Agents
This provides insights into collective behavior in cognitive tasks for researchers in agent-based modeling, though it is incremental as it builds on existing models.
The paper tackled how social influence affects productivity and utility in a network of cognitive agents in a product-consumer environment, finding that social agents increased aggregate consumption and utility but reduced individual average utility per unit consumed.
This paper presents the results of computational experiments on the effects of social influence on individual and systemic behavior of situated cognitive agents in a product-consumer environment. Paired experiments were performed with identical initial conditions to compare social agents with non- social agents. Experiment results show that social agents are more productive in consuming available products, both in terms of aggregate unit consumption and aggregate utility. But this comes at a cost of individual average utility per unit consumed. In effect, social interaction achieved higher productivity by 'lowering the standards' of individual consumers. While still at an early stage of development, such an agent-based model laboratory is shown to be an effective research tool to investigate rich collective behavior in the context of demanding cognitive tasks.