Social games in a social network

Abstract

We study an evolutionary version of the Prisoner's Dilemma game, played by agents placed in a small-world network. Agents are able to change their strategy, imitating that of the most successful neighbor. We observe that different topologies, ranging from regular lattices to random graphs, produce a variety of emergent behaviors. This is a contribution towards the study of social phenomena and transitions governed by the topology of the community.

Evolutionary game dynamics with non-uniform interaction rates

“…There is much current interest to study evolutionary game dynamics on graphs, which also leads to non-uniform interaction rates. [Ellison, 1993, Nakamaru et al, 1997& 1998, Epstein, 1998, Abramson & Kuperman, 2001, Ebel & Bornholdt, 2002, Szabo & Vukov, 2004, Ifti & et al, 2004, Nakamaru & Iwasa, 2005, Lieberman et al, 2005 The fundamental Lotka-Volterra equation of ecology is equivalent to the replicator equation of evolutionary game theory [Hofbauer & Sigmund, 2003].…”

Does mobility decrease cooperation?

“…These spatial games, where the interactions are localized and non random, have been studied and extended in many ways (see, for example, Refs. [1,2,4,9,10,15,19,22,23,24,25,29,30,31,34,37,38,40,41,44,45,46,47,49,52]). Once the population is spatially structured, a natural question concerns the effects of mobility that, along with other important biological factors, is often neglected [28]: is it possible to evolve and sustain cooperation in a population of mobile agents, where retaliation can be avoided by moving away from the former partner?…”

The prisoner’s dilemma on co-evolving networks under perfect rationality

“…Interesting aspects of the PD on random graphs have been analyzed in [17]; the role of small world networks was tackled in [18]. Effects of entries in the payoff matrix and addition of noise have been examined on different types of two-dimensional lattices [19].…”