The pursuit of happiness

Debora Princepe; Onofrio Mazzarisi; Erol Akcay; Simon A. Levin; Matteo Marsili

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arXiv · 2506.10537

The pursuit of happiness

Debora Princepe·Onofrio Mazzarisi·Erol Akcay·Simon A. Levin·Matteo Marsili

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Abstract

Happiness, in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, was understood quite differently from today's popular notions of personal pleasure. Happiness implies a flourishing life - one of virtue, purpose, and contribution to the common good. This paper studies populations of individuals - that we call homo-felix - who maximise an objective function that we call happiness. The happiness of one individual depends on the payoffs that they receive in games they play with their peers as well as on the happiness of the peers they interact with. Individuals care more or less about others depending on whether that makes them more or less happy. This paper analyses the happiness feedback loops that result from these interactions in simple settings. We find that individuals tend to care more about individuals who are happier than what they would be by being selfish. In simple 2 x 2 game theoretic settings, we show that homo-felix can converge to a variety of equilibria which includes but goes beyond Nash equilibria. In an n-persons public good game we show that the non-cooperative Nash equilibrium is marginally unstable and a single individual who develops prosocial behaviour is able to drive almost the whole population to a cooperative state.

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Debora Princepe, Onofrio Mazzarisi, Erol Akcay, Simon A. Levin, Matteo Marsili. 2025-06-12. The pursuit of happiness. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10537

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