English

Cops or robbers - a bistable society

Physics and Society 2009-11-13 v3 Computational Physics

Abstract

The norm game described by Axelrod in 1985 was recently treated with the master equation formalism. Here we discuss the equations, where {\it i)} those who break the norm cannot punish and those who punish cannot break the norm, {\it ii)} the tendency to punish is suppressed if the majority breaks the norm. The second mechanism is new. For some values of the parameters the solution shows the saddle-point bifurcation. Then, two stable solutions are possible, where the majority breaks the norm or the majority punishes. This means, that the norm breaking can be discontinuous, when measured in the social scale. The bistable character is reproduced also with new computer simulations on the Erd{\H o}s--R\'enyi directed network.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0802.1488,
  title  = {Cops or robbers - a bistable society},
  author = {Krzysztof Kulakowski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0802.1488},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

8 pages, 2 figures. Some misleading sentences are removed from section 3

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:11:36.107Z