The Role of Information in Group Formation

A vast body of literature studies problems such as cooperation and coordination in groups, but the reasons why groups exist in the first place and hold together are still not clear: in presence of within-group competition, individuals are better off leaving the group. An environment that is advantageous to groups, e.g. better chances of succeeding at or escaping from predation, seems to play a key role for the existence of groups. Another recurrent explanation in the literature is between-group competition. We argue that information constraints can foster sociable behavior, which in turn is responsible for group creation. We compare, by means of an agent-based simulation, navigation strategies that exploit information about the behavior of others. We find that individuals that have sociable behavior have higher fitness than individualistic individuals for certain environmental configuration.