Abstract
BackgroundWe study the evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma on two social networks substrates obtained from actual relational data.Methodology/Principal FindingsWe find very different cooperation levels on each of them that cannot be easily understood in terms of global statistical properties of both networks. We claim that the result can be understood at the mesoscopic scale, by studying the community structure of the networks. We explain the dependence of the cooperation level on the temptation parameter in terms of the internal structure of the communities and their interconnections. We then test our results on community-structured, specifically designed artificial networks, finding a good agreement with the observations in both real substrates.ConclusionOur results support the conclusion that studies of evolutionary games on model networks and their interpretation in terms of global properties may not be sufficient to study specific, real social systems. Further, the study allows us to define new quantitative parameters that summarize the mesoscopic structure of any network. In addition, the community perspective may be helpful to interpret the origin and behavior of existing networks as well as to design structures that show resilient cooperative behavior.
Highlights
The emergence and survival of cooperation in adverse environments has been, for a long time, a challenging problem for scholars in disciplines as diverse as biology, sociology or economics [1,2,3]
The PGP network presents an almost constant cooperation level, with a variation of a 10% at most in all the range of b values, except for b = 2. These results inmediately lead to the conclusion that there is no typical behavior of the cooperation level on true social networks, at least in the framework of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) with imitation dynamics or learning
In this work we have addressed the issue of the emergence of cooperation on true social networks in the framework of the evolutionary PD with imitation
Summary
The emergence and survival of cooperation in adverse environments has been, for a long time, a challenging problem for scholars in disciplines as diverse as biology, sociology or economics [1,2,3]. Within the general framework of evolutionary game theory, which is well suited to study this problem, the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) is a paradigmatic setting to capture the paradox of altruism persistence against short-term benefits of egoism. In this game two players choose between cooperation (C) or defection (D), the payoffs for the two actions being as shown in the following (Table 1). We study the evolutionary Prisoner’s Dilemma on two social networks substrates obtained from actual relational data
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