Modeling ethno-religious conflicts as Prisoner's Dilemma game in graphs

In this paper, we present and analyze a multi-agent game theoretic model of conflicts in multi-cultural societies. Two salient factors responsible for violence in multi-cultural societies (that are identified in the social sciences literature) are (a) ethnoreligious identity of the population and (b) spatial structure (distribution) of the population. It has also been experimentally shown by Lumsden that multi-cultural conflict can be viewed as a Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game. Using the above observations, we model the multi-cultural conflict problem as a variant of the repeated PD game in graphs. The graph consists of labeled nodes corresponding to the different ethno-religious types and the topology of the graph encode the spatial distribution and interaction of the population. The agents play the game with neighbors of their opponent type and they update their strategies based on neighbors of their same type. This strategy update dynamics with different update neighborhood from game playing neighborhood distinguishes our model from conventional models of PD games in graphs. We present simulation results showing the effect of various parameters of our model to the propensity of conflict in a population consisting of two ethno-religious groups.