Fairness norm through social networks: a simulation approach

Recently there has been an increased interest in adopting game-theoretic models to social norms. Most of these approaches are generally lacking a structure linking the local level of the ‘norm’ interaction to its global ‘social’ nature. Although numerous studies examined local-interaction games, where the emphasis is placed on neighborhood relations, regarding social network as a whole unique entity seems to be quite limited. In this paper, we conduct a series of simulation experiments to examine the effects that a network topology could have on the speed of emergence of the social norm. The emphasis is placed on the fairness norm in the ultimatum game context, by considering three network type models (Barabási–Albert, Watts–Strogatz and Erdős–Rényi) and several intrinsic topological properties.