Imitation Of Success Leads To Cost Of Living Mediated Fairness In The Ultimatum Game

In this paper, we analyze a social imitation model that incorporates internal energy caches (e.g., food money savings), cost of living, death, and reproduction into the Ultimatum Game. We show that when imitation (and death) occurs, a natural correlation between selfishness and cost of living emerges. However, in all societies that do not collapse, non-Nash sharing strategies emerge as the de facto result of imitation. We explain these results by constructing a mean-field approximation of the internal energy cache informed by time-varying distributions extracted from experimental data. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.