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Dryad

Simulated results from an agent-based model examining inequality and innovation in social networks

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Nov 14, 2023 version files 430.32 MB

Abstract

Theories of innovation often balance contrasting views that either smart people create smart things or smartly constructed institutions create smart things. While population models have shown factors including population size, connectivity, and agent behavior as crucial for innovation, few have taken the individual-central approach seriously by examining the role individuals play within their groups. To explore how network structures influence not only population-level innovation but also performance among individuals, we studied an agent-based model of the Potions Task, a paradigm developed to test how structure affects a group's ability to solve a difficult exploration task. We explore how size, connectivity, and rates of information sharing in a network influence innovation and how these have an impact on the emergence of inequality in terms of agent contributions. We find, in line with prior work, population size has a positive effect on innovation, but that large and small populations perform similarly per capita; that many small groups outperform fewer large groups; that random changes to structure have few effects on innovation; and that the highest performing agents tend to occupy more central network positions. Moreover, we show that every network factor which facilitates innovation leads to a proportional increase in inequality of performance, creating "genius effects" among otherwise "dumb" agents in both idealized and real-world networks.