Analysis for Behavioral Economics in Social Networks: An Altruism-Based Dynamic Cooperation Model

Abstract

Aiming at uncooperative behaviors such as free-riding, white-washing and sybil attacks, and the lack of rationality hypothesis in the traditional economic models, the paper presents an Altruism-Based Dynamic Model (ABDM) in social networks by introducing views from reciprocal altruistic theory. Considering the initiative of nodes behind reciprocal altruistic behaviors, the ABDM improves the cooperation rate of the network and promotes the propagation of cooperative behavior by using the nodes’ inherent ability of reciprocal altruism. Furthermore, based on nodes’ bounded rationality, ABDM also perfects models of traditional economic theories. The simulation results show that compared with the traditional model, the proposed ABDM has the higher level of cooperation, the stronger scalability and the better robustness. On this basis, the paper analyzes the ABDM at different scenarios: varying group sizes and population; behavior selection under varying parameter settings (cost-to-benefit ratios of the psychological payoff and etc.). With the more efficient interactions among the nodes, the ABDM model can improve the efficiency of parallel processing.