Social Recommendations Rather than Social Values

We study two different modes of social influence on human or artificial decision makers operating in complex environments. One is through emulation of social values, and the other is through social recommendations for specific actions. In an economic environment where agents make trade and consumption decisions, we observe that emulation of social values may speed up learning, but may as well coordinate agents on a suboptimal mode of behavior. Social recommendations on the other hand, do help in learning equilibrium play in the same context. The results of the paper shed some light on how to incorporate social influence in a case-based approach via classifier systems to dynamic programming problems.