Taxonomy / Convention equilibrium / Tuning the interaction structure

Tuning the interaction structure

The researcher fixes in advance what the agents are choosing between — a name for an object, an amount to donate — and then turns the dials on the population itself: how many agents there are, who is paired with whom, what each one can see of what others did before, how many hold a fixed position and refuse to move, how many generations pass. Nothing in the environment states a rule and nothing inside the agent stores one; the convention is simply the option the population settles on, and it holds only because everyone expects everyone else to hold it. What gets reported is which option wins, how fast, and how small a committed minority has to be to flip the whole group.

The method, against Convention equilibrium

Scroll the diagram sideways to see all of it.

Concept Analysis: Theoretical Foundations

Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. A concept that is absent and was never claimed is a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work, and is marked out of scope.

Convention as Equilibrium

PresentClaimed · delivered

Definition · David Hume (1740); David K. Lewis, Convention (1969)

This concept states that a norm can hold without ever being decreed, as a stable equilibrium of mutual expectation. Each party conforms because the others do, and no party gains by departing from it alone.

Analysis

This is what the work demonstrates. Populations of agents converge on shared conventions with no rulebook and no judge, including the tipping dynamics by which a committed minority shifts the rest of the population.

Conditional Preferences

PartialNot claimed

Definition · Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society (2006)

This concept states that people follow a norm on two conditions: that they expect others to follow it, and that they believe others expect it of them. The norm therefore holds or shifts with those expectations rather than with anyone's private preference.

Analysis

Agents adjust to each other's behavior, so mutual expectation is doing real work. However, the specific structure Bicchieri describes, i.e., conforming because others are believed to expect it, is generally neither represented nor measured, and convergence is read off outcomes alone.

Discovered vs. Designed Order

AbsentNot claimed · out of scope

Definition · F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973)

This claim goes beyond saying that norms can emerge without a designer. It holds that emergent norms are often better, since they absorb local knowledge dispersed across a population that no central rule-writer could collect.

Analysis

The experiments show that norms emerge, which is the descriptive part of the claim. Hayek's further claim, that emergence is itself a reason to trust the result, is not tested, since nothing here evaluates the quality of what the population converged on. A population may settle on a harmful equilibrium, and the method would generally not register the difference.

Papers

No method has been built here yet — this approach rests entirely on what follows.

Source artifacts

Primary documents and shared infrastructure this approach works from or produces, rather than studies of them.

Cultural evolution in populations of Large Language Models

Jérémy Perez et al., Mar 2024

arXiv:2403.08882ResourceBuilt

Provides an open-source framework for simulating cultural evolution in populations of LLM agents, letting the variables cultural evolution cares about — network structure, agent personality, and how social information is aggregated and transformed — be manipulated directly.

Findings about it

What existing systems were observed to do. These characterise the problem the approach addresses without introducing a mechanism.

Emergent social conventions and collective bias in LLM populations

Ariel Flint Ashery et al., Oct 2024

arXiv:2410.08948133 citationsAnalysisBuilt

A population of LLM agents playing a naming game spontaneously converges on shared conventions, with committed-minority tipping points.

Cultural Evolution of Cooperation among LLM Agents

Aron Vallinder & Edward Hughes, Dec 2024

arXiv:2412.10270AnalysisBuilt

Plays a classic iterated Donor Game across generations of LLM agents that can observe their peers' recent behavior, and finds indirect reciprocity evolving very differently by base model — Claude 3.5 Sonnet societies reach substantially higher average scores than Gemini 1.5 ones.