The main objective of this project is to explore the emergent scientific space generated
by the intersection of three different paradigms dedicated to the study of
self-organizing mechanisms in social systems: prehistoric etno-anthropology and
social anthropology, experimental economics, and multiagent systems.

The project aims to study the mechanisms of self-organization in societies where it does
not exist a centralized control mechanism and where the institutional level is
almost inexistent.

We will study the mechanisms in charge of self-organization and distributed
social control (as it is the case of reputation) that generate social norms in
human societies and that can be easily applicable to virtual environments,
either entirely populated by artificial entities (autonomous agents) or virtual
societies, where both humans and virtual agents coexist.

The work developed should serve as a guide to treat similar research topics
where the behaviour of a group of individuals responds to the individual
adoption of certain social conventions. This research can lead to three
different and complementary paths: (i) a theoretical work where different
social coordination mechanisms are identified by using the models and
simulations suggested in this project; (ii) an instrumental work where the methodology
and tools developed under this project are refined to build a technological
corpus for social scientists; (iii) and finally, the application of several
mechanisms for social coordination and the technological corpus in virtual
communities as the integration of web services, ubiquitous and pervasive
computing applications, and the online gaming applications.