Section 12: Coordination and Culture
In this set of lectures, we consider some models of culture. We begin with some background on what culture is and why it's so important to social scientists. In the analytic section, we begin with a very simple game called the pure coordination game In this game, the players win only if they choose the same action. Which action they choose doesn't matter -- so long as they choose the same one. For example, whether you drive on the left or the right side of the road is not important, but what is important is that you drive on the same side as everyone else. We then consider situations in which people play multiple coordination games and study the emergence of culture. In our final model, we include a desire consistency as well as coordination in a model that produces the sorts of cultural signatures seen in real world data. The readings for this section include some of my notes on coordination games and then the Bednar et al academic paper. In that paper, you see how we used Markov Processes to study the model. There is also a link to the Axelrod Net Logo Model.
2013-11-19 (120min) Coursera open course: Model Thinking by Scott E. Page Start from 10.07.2013, will end on 12.16.2013 Link: https://class.coursera.org/modelthinking-005/class/index;
Vocabulary learning:
Section 12: Coordination and Culture In this set of lectures, we consider some models of culture. We begin with some background on what culture is and why it's so important to social scientists. In the analytic section, we begin with a very simple game called the pure coordination game In this game, the players win only if they choose the same action. Which action they choose doesn't matter -- so long as they choose the same one. For example, whether you drive on the left or the right side of the road is not important, but what is important is that you drive on the same side as everyone else. We then consider situations in which people play multiple coordination games and study the emergence of culture. In our final model, we include a desire consistency as well as coordination in a model that produces the sorts of cultural signatures seen in real world data. The readings for this section include some of my notes on coordination games and then the Bednar et al academic paper. In that paper, you see how we used Markov Processes to study the model. There is also a link to the Axelrod Net Logo Model.
Coordination Games
Bednar et al. 2010
Axelrod Culture Model in Netlogo