Community structure benefits the fixation of cooperation under strong selection

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.

arXiv comment7 pages, 4 figures, all comments are wellcomed

References in corpus (22)

• Finding and evaluating community structure in networks
• Modularity and community structure in networks
• Finding community structure in networks using the eigenvectors of matrices
• The structure of scientific collaboration networks
• Benchmark graphs for testing community detection algorithms
• Specificity and stability in topology of protein networks
• Evolutionary games on graphs
• Who is the best connected scientist? A study of scientific coauthorship networks
• Coevolutionary games - a mini review
• Dynamics of person-to-person interactions from distributed RFID sensor networks
• High resolution dynamical mapping of social interactions with active RFID
• Evolutionary game theory: Temporal and spatial effects beyond replicator dynamics
• Phase diagrams for Prisoner's Dilemma game on two-dimensional lattices
• Information diffusion epidemics in social networks
• Cooperation in noisy case: prisoner's dilemma game on two types of regular random graphs
• Origins of power-law degree distribution in the heterogeneity of human activity in social networks
• Enhancement of cooperation in highly clustered scale-free networks
• Zero-determinant alliances in multiplayer social dilemmas
• Spatial prisoner's dilemma game with volunteering in Newman-Watts small-world networks
• Human Activity in the Web
• Prisoner's Dilemma on community networks
• Evolution of cooperation in multilevel public goods games with community structures

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Identifying multi-scale communities in networks by asymptotic surprise
• Effects of updating rules on the coevolving prisoner's dilemma
• Enhancement of cooperation by giving high-degree neighbors more help
• Community detection based on significance optimization in complex networks
• A model for cooperative scientific research inspired by the ant colony algorithm
• Punishment in bipartite societies