Modeling production with artificial societies: The emergence of social structure

This paper presents a new experiment undertaken in the artificial society introduced by Epstein and Axtell [1]. The artificial society basically consists of a "cellular" landscape that contains resources and a population of agents that move around in this landscape, searching for the resources that they need to consume in order to survive. The new experiment introduces production and trade in this model in a very simple manner: the richest agents can produce a new commodity, named vitamin, that the other agents can buy and consume. The effect of the vitamins is to improve the agent's skills for a certain period of time, proportional to the quantity consumed. Running the artificial societies program with this new scenario, one can notice the improvement of population dynamics, explained by the fact that the agents have better survival skills. The most important effect is that the dynamics of agents' wealth shows a very clear clustering of agents after the level of their accumulated resources, phenomenon that we have called emergence of social classes.