Abstract
Situations of conflict giving rise to social dilemmas are widespread in society and game theory is one major way in which they can be investigated. Starting from the observation that individuals in society interact through networks of acquaintances, we model the co-evolution of the agents’ strategies and of the social network itself using two prototypical games, the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Stag-Hunt. Allowing agents to dismiss ties and establish new ones, we find that cooperation and coordination can be achieved through the self-organization of the social network, a result that is nontrivial, especially in the Prisoner’s Dilemma case. The evolution and stability of cooperation implies the condensation of agents exploiting particular game strategies into strong and stable clusters which are more densely connected, even in the more difficult case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abramson G, Kuperman M (2001) Social games in a social network. Physics Reviews E 63: 030901.
Amaral LAN, Scala A, Barthélemy M, Stanley HE (2000) Classes of small-world networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 97: 11149–11152.
Axelrod R (1984) The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books.
Barabási A-L, Jeong H, Néda Z, Ravasz E, Schubert A, Vicsek T (2002) Evolution of the social network of scientific collaborations. Physica A 311: 590–614.
Bollobás B (1998) Modern Graph Theory. Berlin: Springer.
Hauert C, Doebeli M (2004) Spatial structure often inhibits the evolution of cooperation in the snowdrift game. Nature 428: 643–646.
Hebb DO (1949) The Organization of Behavior. New York: Wiley.
Hofbauer J, Sigmund K (1998) Evolutionary Games and Population Dynamics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huberman BA, Glance NS (1993) Evolutionary games and computer simulations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 90: 7716–7718.
Kossinets G, Watts DJ (2006) Empirical analysis of an evolving social network. Science 311: 88–90.
Luthi L, Giacobini M, Tomassini M (2006) A minimal information prisoner’s dilemma on evolving networks. In: Artificial Life X (Rocha LM, ed), 438–444. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Luthi L, Pestelacci E, Tomassini M (2008) Cooperation and community structure in social networks. Physica A 387: 955–966.
Myerson RB (1991) Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Newman MEJ (2001) Scientific collaboration networks. I. Network construction and fundamental results. Physics Review E 64: 016131.
Newman MEJ (2003) The structure and function of complex networks. SIAM Review 45: 167–256.
Nowak MA, May RM (1992) Evolutionary games and spatial chaos. Nature 359: 826–829.
Nowak MA, Sigmund K (2000) Games on grids. In: The Geometry of Ecological Interactions: Simplifying Spatial Complexity (Dieckmann U, Law R, Metz JAJ, eds), 135–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Santos FC, Pacheco JM (2005) Scale-free networks provide a unifying framework for the emergence of cooperation. Physical Review Letters 95: 098104.
Santos FC, Pacheco JM, Lenaerts T (2006) Cooperation prevails when individuals adjust their social ties. PLoS Computational Biology 2: 1284–1291.
Skyrms B (2004) The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Skyrms B, Pemantle R (2000) A dynamic model for social network formation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 97: 9340–9346.
Szabó G, Fáth G (2007) Evolutionary games on graphs. Physics Reports 446: 97–216.
Tomassini M, Luthi L (2007) Empirical analysis of the evolution of a scientific collaboration network. Physica A 385: 750–764.
Tomassini M, Luthi L, Giacobini M (2006) Hawks and doves on small-world networks. Physics Reviews E 73: 016132.
Tomassini M, Luthi L, Giacobini M, Langdon WB (2007) The structure of the genetic programming collaboration network. Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines 8: 97–103.
Wang S, Szalay MS, Zhang C, Csermely P (2008) Learning and innovative elements of strategy adoption rules expand cooperative network topologies. PLoS ONE 3(4): e1917. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001917.
Weibull JW (1995) Evolutionary Game Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Zimmermann MG, Eguíluz VM (2005) Cooperation, social networks, and the emergence of leadership in a prisoner’s dilemma with adaptive local interactions. Physics Reviews E 72: 056118.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Pestelacci, E., Tomassini, M. & Luthi, L. Evolution of Cooperation and Coordination in a Dynamically Networked Society. Biol Theory 3, 139–153 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1162/biot.2008.3.2.139
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/biot.2008.3.2.139