Strategic Interaction in Interacting Particle Systems

Abstract

In the last decades, models inspired by statistical mechanics have been vastly used in the context of social sciences to model the behavior of interacting economic actors. In particular, parallel updating models such as Probabilistic Cellular Automata have been proved to be very useful to represent rational agents aiming at maximize their utility in the presence of social externalities. What PCA do not account for is strategic interaction, i.e., the fact that, when deciding, agents forecast the action of other agents. In this contribution, we compare models that differ in the presence of strategic interaction and memory of past actions. We will show that the emergent equilibria can be very different: Fixed points, cycles of period 2, and chaotic behavior may appear and, possibly, coexist for some values of the parameters, of the model.