Costi di coordinamento e vantaggi di aggregazione: esiti, morfologia e processi di interazione in un mondo artificiale multi-agente

In the real world, many social and economic interactions are highly affected by coordination problems. These, in turn, emerge from the trial to dynamically organize strategies of collective action in complex contexts where agents and groups are heterogeneous and information is only imperfectly transmitted. In such an environment, rational strategies of coordination games cannot be set ex-ante because, even if benefits from collective coordination are common knowledge, yet there exist many unknown ex-post costs to be sustained. Agent-based simulations done in this paper show how these costs impact the net payoff in different stages of the game with different weights depending on structure of the environment and nature of co-players. With perfect information, coordination is the outcome of the game, as game theory predicts. On the contrary, if coordination costs are positive, coordination failures frequently emerge, even in absence of opportunism (as postulated in this paper). Moreover, our simulations show that information costs are more important, in determining the success of coordination, than both organization and supervision costs. Finally, a new kind of coordination failure can emerge from the dynamic interaction among agents even in contexts where ex-ante gross payoffs are sufficiently high.