Community structure benefits the fixation of cooperation under strong selection
arXiv:1408.3267 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.91.012802
Abstract
Recent empirical studies suggest that heavy-tailed distributions of human activities are universal in real social dynamics [Muchnik, \emph{et al.}, Sci. Rep. \textbf{3}, 1783 (2013)]. On the other hand, community structure is ubiquitous in biological and social networks [M.~E.~J. Newman, Nat. Phys. \textbf{8}, 25 (2012)]. Motivated by these facts, we here consider the evolutionary Prisoner's dilemma game taking place on top of a real social network to investigate how the community structure and the heterogeneity in activity of individuals affect the evolution of cooperation. In particular, we account for a variation of the birth-death process (which can also be regarded as a proportional imitation rule from social point of view) for the strategy updating under both weak- and strong-selection (meaning the payoffs harvested from games contribute either slightly or heavily to the individuals' performance). By implementing comparative studies, where the players are selected either randomly or in terms of their actual activities to playing games with their immediate neighbors, we figure out that heterogeneous activity benefits the emergence of collective cooperation in harsh environment (the action for cooperation is costly) under strong selection, while it impairs the formation of altruism under weak selection. Moreover, we find that the abundance of communities in the social network can evidently foster the fixation of cooperation under strong-selection, in contrast to the games evolving on the randomized counterparts. Our results are therefore helpful for us to better understand the evolution of cooperation in real social systems.
7 pages, 4 figures, all comments are wellcomed
References in corpus (10)
- Modularity and community structure in networks
- Finding community structure in networks using the eigenvectors of matrices
- Benchmark graphs for testing community detection algorithms
- Evolutionary games on graphs
- Dynamics of person-to-person interactions from distributed RFID sensor networks
- Cooperation in noisy case: prisoner's dilemma game on two types of regular random graphs
- Enhancement of cooperation in highly clustered scale-free networks
- Zero-determinant alliances in multiplayer social dilemmas
- Human Activity in the Web
- Prisoner's Dilemma on community networks