Modelling the impact of role specialisation on cooperative behaviour in historic trader scenarios

Abstract

We analyse two well-established historic trader scenarios from the area of comparative economics known as the Maghribi Traders Coalition and the contemporary Genoese traders, which contrast the otherwise comparable individualistic Genoese and collectivistic North-African trader societies by the institutions they used to sustain cooperative behaviour. We employ agent-based modelling to test a previously unexplored aspect, namely whether a unified role structure (unifying the contrasting investor and merchant perspectives - something that could have characterised one of the two communities in question, the Maghribis) could have been a contributing factor to sustain cooperation for the collective group of Maghribi Traders. To model the emerging institutions, we utilise a continuous notion of deontics that supports the adoption of norms from an experiential perspective. Our simulation results support the idea that experiencing economic transactions from different perspectives increases the convergence performance towards stable behaviour, and supports the enforcement of cooperation by informal means, such as norms, based on their stronger normative alignment.