Robustness of cultural communities in an open-ended Axelrod's model

We consider an open-ended set of cultural features in the Axelrod model of cultural dissemination. By replacing the features in which a high degree of consensus is achieved by new ones, we address here an essential ingredient of societies: the evolution of topics as a result of social dynamics and debate. Our results show that, once cultural clusters have been formed, the introduction of new topics into the social debate has little effect on them, but it does have a significant influence on the cultural overlap. Along with the Monte Carlo simulations, we derive and numerically solve an equation for the stationary cultural overlap based on a mean-field approach which reproduces the qualitative behavior of the model. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.