Abstract
Cooperative behavior, which pervades nature, can be significantly enhanced when agents interact in a structured rather than random way; however, the key structural factors that affect cooperation are not well understood. Moreover, the role structure plays with cooperation has largely been studied through observing overall cooperation rather than the underlying components that together shape cooperative behavior. In this paper we address these two problems by first applying evolutionary games to a wide range of networks, where agents play the Prisoner's Dilemma with a three-component stochastic strategy, and then analyzing agent-based simulation results using principal component analysis. With these methods we study the evolution of trust, reciprocity and forgiveness as a function of several structural parameters. This work demonstrates that community structure, represented by network modularity, among all the tested structural parameters, has the most significant impact on the emergence of cooperative behavior, with forgiveness showing the largest sensitivity to community structure. We also show that increased community structure reduces the dispersion of trust and forgiveness, thereby reducing the network-level uncertainties for these two components; graph transitivity and degree also significantly influence the evolutionary dynamics of the population and the diversity of strategies at equilibrium.
Highlights
Cooperative behavior, which pervades nature, can be significantly enhanced when agents interact in a structured rather than random way; the key structural factors that affect cooperation are not well understood
In this paper we address these two problems by first applying evolutionary games to a wide range of networks, where agents play the Prisoner’s Dilemma with a three-component stochastic strategy, and analyzing agent-based simulation results using principal component analysis
This work demonstrates that community structure, represented by network modularity, among all the tested structural parameters, has the most significant impact on the emergence of cooperative behavior, with forgiveness showing the largest sensitivity to community structure
Summary
Cooperative behavior, which pervades nature, can be significantly enhanced when agents interact in a structured rather than random way; the key structural factors that affect cooperation are not well understood. Foundational work by Ref. 22 and Ref. 23 demonstrated that cooperative or altruistic genes may dominate a neighborhood when distributed locally due to an increase in the relatedness of individuals; this localized dispersion creates competition for resources that naturally limits the spread of these genes This balance between sufficient structure for interactions between like individuals and the challenges of local competition was later studied by Ref. 17, who found that relatively sparse connectivity encourages cooperation with the intuition that agents with fewer ties value their relations more than agents with more ties and so are more likely to exhibit prosocial behavior in order to maintain those ties. Beyond some of these special structures, the current literature lacks a general understanding of the way link distribution affects cooperation
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