Fair Topologies: Community Structures and Network Hubs Drive Emergence of Fairness Norms

Fairness has long been argued to govern human behavior in a wide range of social, economic, and organizational activities. The sense of fairness, although universal, varies across different societies. In this study, using a computational model, we test the hypothesis that the topology of social interaction can causally explain some of the cross-societal variations in fairness norms. We show that two network parameters, namely, community structure, as measured by the modularity index, and network hubiness, represented by the skewness of degree distribution, have the most significant impact on emergence of collective fair behavior. These two parameters can explain much of the variations in fairness norms across societies and can also be linked to hypotheses suggested by earlier empirical studies in social and organizational sciences. We devised a multi-layered model that combines local agent interactions with social learning, thus enables both strategic behavior as well as diffusion of successful strategies. By applying multivariate statistics on the results, we obtain the relation between network structural features and the collective fair behavior.