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Abstract
Population structure is a key determinant in fostering cooperation among naturally self-interested individuals in microbial populations, social insect groups, and human societies. Traditional research has focused on static structures, and yet most real interactions are finite in duration and changing in time, forming a temporal network. This raises the question of whether cooperation can emerge and persist despite an intrinsically fragmented population structure. Here we develop a framework to study the evolution of cooperation on temporal networks. Surprisingly, we find that network temporality actually enhances the evolution of cooperation relative to comparable static networks, despite the fact that bursty interaction patterns generally impede cooperation. We resolve this tension by proposing a measure to quantify the amount of temporality in a network, revealing an intermediate level that maximally boosts cooperation. Our results open a new avenue for investigating the evolution of cooperation and other emergent behaviours in more realistic structured populations.
Highlights
Population structure is a key determinant in fostering cooperation among naturally selfinterested individuals in microbial populations, social insect groups, and human societies
We further investigate the impacts of bursty behaviour—a hallmark of many real social interaction patterns[43,44]
We have shown that temporal networks, both empirical and synthetic, generically enhance the emergence of cooperation relative to their static counterparts
Summary
Population structure is a key determinant in fostering cooperation among naturally selfinterested individuals in microbial populations, social insect groups, and human societies. It has been shown that the nontrivial population structures represented by both homogeneous[2,3,4,9,11,12,13] and heterogeneous[10,14,15] networks permit the formation of stable clusters of cooperators (altruists), which achieve higher individual payoffs while resisting exploitation from defectors (egoists) As such, both theoretical analysis[4,9,10,15,16,17,18,19,20] and behavioural experiments[21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28] point to network structure as a key ingredient for the emergence of cooperation. We further investigate the impacts of bursty behaviour (namely, short timeframes of intense activity followed by long windows of relative silence)—a hallmark of many real social interaction patterns[43,44] We find that this facet of temporality is detrimental to the emergence of cooperation, instead facilitating the spread of egoists. We confirm the generality of our results over different types of synthetic networks, varying interaction time scales, updating rules (both synchronous and asynchronous), and game dynamics
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