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Efficient Redistribution of Scarce Resources Favours Hierarchies

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Advances in Social Simulation

Abstract

Common views identify resource abundance as the cause for the emergence of hierarchy in societies. We investigated if hierarchy may also thrive as a mechanism of redistributing scarce and variable resources, mimicking conditions of ancestral, hunter-gatherer societies. To that end, we built an agent-based model in which we compared the relative success of a comprehensive range of redistribution strategies, derived from relational models theory (Fiske in Psychol Rev 99:689–723, 1992) and explored how well populations of agents that adopt different rules for sharing resources thrive under different levels of resource availability, reflecting scarcer versus more abundant environments. Our results show that under most levels of resource availability, a population of agents that redistribute pooled resources according to individual differences in rank among the agents (i.e., reflecting an “Authority Ranking” model), was more sustainable than populations that adopted equal- and need-based sharing rules, as well as agents that did not share resources. Our results suggest that the dominant manifestation of hierarchical organization in society does not require surplus and may derive from its effectiveness in dealing with scarce resources at the group-level.

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Correspondence to Rob M. A. Nelissen .

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Nelissen, R.M.A., Muñoz, I.A., Muñoz, D.C., Kramer, M.R., Hofstede, G.J. (2022). Efficient Redistribution of Scarce Resources Favours Hierarchies. In: Czupryna, M., Kamiński, B. (eds) Advances in Social Simulation. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92843-8_1

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