Evolution of Cooperation through Power Law Distributed Conflicts

Pilwon Kim

Complexity, 2017, vol. 2017, 1-7

Abstract:

At an individual level, cooperation can be seen as a behaviour that uses personal resource to support others or the groups which one belongs to. In a conflict between two individuals, a selfish person gains an advantage over a cooperative opponent, while in a group-group conflict the group with more cooperators wins. In this work, we develop a population model with continual conflicts at various scales and show cooperation can be sustained even when interpersonal conflicts dominate, as long as the conflict size follows a power law. The power law assumption has been met in several observations from real-world conflicts. Specifically if the population is structured on a scale-free network, both the power law distribution of conflicts and the survival of cooperation can be naturally induced without assuming a homogeneous population or frequent relocation of members. On the scale-free network, even when most people become selfish from continual person-person conflicts, people on the hubs tend to remain unselfish and play a role as “repositories” of cooperation.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/8503/2017/9271651.pdf (application/pdf)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/8503/2017/9271651.xml (text/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hin:complx:9271651

DOI: 10.1155/2017/9271651

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Complexity from Hindawi
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mohamed Abdelhakeem ().