Abstract
The hypothesis that social influence leads to an increase in the division of labor, or specialization, in complex agent systems is introduced. Specialization, in turn, leads to increased productivity in such social systems. In this study, we examine the effect of social influence on the level of agent specialization in complex systems connected via social networks. Several methods attempt to explain the overall makeup of social influence and the emergence of specialization in general, with the most prominent being the genetic threshold model. This model posits that agents possess an inherent threshold for task stimulus, and when that threshold is exceeded, the agent will perform that task. The implication of social influence is that an agent’s choice of which task to specialize in when multiple ones are available is influenced by the choices of its neighbours. Using the threshold model and an established metric that quantifies the level of agent specialization, we find that social influence indeed leads to an increase in the division of labour.
We further investigate the sensitivity of the social influence rate on the overall level of system specialization. The social influence rate is important in the social context because it determines how swayed an agent is by the decisions of other agents in its group. On one hand, a high social influence rate will cause agents to mimic the collective behaviour of its neighbours. On the other hand, a rate that is too small will cause agents to choose primarily based on genetic factors. Experimental results, by way of comparing different rate selection strategies, reveal that increases in the social influence rate causes increases in the agent specialization within the system.
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Cockburn, D., Kobti, Z. (2009). Agent Specialization in Complex Social Swarms. In: Lim, C.P., Jain, L.C., Dehuri, S. (eds) Innovations in Swarm Intelligence. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 248. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04225-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04225-6_5
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