Effect of epidemic dynamics on evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game in scale-free networks

Abstract

This paper studies the evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game (PDG) in finite dynamic scale-free networks, where the dynamic property is fulfilled by considering an epidemic process in networks. When a person is in infected state, he will not play PDG. Only healthy persons play PDG with their healthy neighbors. Our simulations show that (i) the ratio of healthy persons, R s , depends not only on the spreading rate λ, but also on the recovery rate δ; (ii) The relationship between cooperation behaviors and the spreading rate λ depends on the value of δ; (iii) Given the same value of R s and payoff parameter b , the cooperation frequency f changes with δ; (iv) Some curves of f against R s are monotonic while others are non-monotonic. We have qualitatively explained results (ii)-(iv) through competition mechanism of cooperation enhancement effect and cooperation suppression effect. Our work sheds some lights on the important effect of dynamic topology on evolutionary game.