Multi-agent Simulation for Voting by Small Community

This paper proposes a multi-agent simulation for examining iterated "proposal-voting process" by a relatively small community. Decision-making that can be modeled as "iterated proposal-voting process" is frequently observed, especially in small communities such as families and groups of close friends. In this case, the results do not always integrate the intentions of all members but in fact violate the intentions of certain members. Furthermore the decision process becomes complicated, or the so-called "groupthink" emerges. To investigate such processes, we developed a multi-agent simulator, in which, each agent decides its action based on two criteria: satisfying "physiologically fixed needs" and satisfying "social contextual needs," which sometimes conflict with each other. These criteria are based on a Nursing Theory that puts special emphasis on the relation between subjects and others. Social needs are satisfied when such relations are balanced that are evaluated by employing "Hyder's theory of cognitive balance." The simulation yields some interesting phenomena that are not observed by conventional static analyses, e.g. power indices.