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Establishing social cooperation: The role of hubs and community structure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2018

BARRY COOPER ,
ANDREW E. M. LEWIS-PYE ,
ANGSHENG LI ,
YICHENG PAN  and
XI YONG
BARRY COOPER
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK (e-mail: pmt6sbc@leeds.ac.uk)
ANDREW E. M. LEWIS-PYE
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, London School of Economics and Political Science, London WC2A 2AE, UK (e-mail: a.lewis7@lse.ac.uk)
ANGSHENG LI
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, P. R. China (e-mail: angsheng@ios.ac.cn, yicheng@ios.ac.cn)
YICHENG PAN
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, P. R. China (e-mail: angsheng@ios.ac.cn, yicheng@ios.ac.cn)
XI YONG
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, P. R. China University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, P. R. China (e-mail: yongxi@mwr.gov.cn)
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Abstract

Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) games have become a well-established paradigm for studying the mechanisms by which cooperative behavior may evolve in societies consisting of selfish individuals. Recent research has focused on the effect of spatial and connectivity structure in promoting the emergence of cooperation in scenarios where individuals play games with their neighbors, using simple “memoryless” rules to decide their choice of strategy in repeated games. While heterogeneity and structural features such as clustering have been seen to lead to reasonable levels of cooperation in very restricted settings, no conditions on network structure have been established, which robustly ensure the emergence of cooperation in a manner that is not overly sensitive to parameters such as network size, average degree, or the initial proportion of cooperating individuals. Here, we consider a natural random network model, with parameters that allow us to vary the level of “community” structure in the network, as well as the number of high degree hub nodes. We investigate the effect of varying these structural features and show that, for appropriate choices of these parameters, cooperative behavior does now emerge in a truly robust fashion and to a previously unprecedented degree. The implication is that cooperation (as modelled here by PD games) can become the social norm in societal structures divided into smaller communities, and in which hub nodes provide the majority of inter-community connections.

Keywords

cooperative behaviourPrisoner's Dilemmarepeated gameshubscommunitycomputer sciencesociology
Type
Research Article
Information
Network Science , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , June 2018 , pp. 251 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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