Study of social consciousness in stochastic agent based simulations: application to supply chains

Empirical game theory allows studying the strategic interactions of agents in simulations. Specifically, traditional game theory describes such interactions by an analytical model, while empirical game theory employs simulations. In this paper, we use empirical game theory to study how the more-or-less selfishness of agents affects their behaviour. To this end, we assume that every agent utility can be split in two parts, a first part representing the direct utility of agents and a second part representing agent social consciousness, i.e., their impact on the rest of the multiagent system. An application to supply chains illustrates this approach. In this application, the collaborative strategy is often used by every company-agent at whatever their same level of social consciousness, which may indicate that every agent is strongly related with one other.