Evolution of Cooperation in Social Dilemmas on Complex Networks

Swami Iyer and Timothy Killingback

PLOS Computational Biology, 2016, vol. 12, issue 2, 1-25

Abstract: Cooperation in social dilemmas is essential for the functioning of systems at multiple levels of complexity, from the simplest biological organisms to the most sophisticated human societies. Cooperation, although widespread, is fundamentally challenging to explain evolutionarily, since natural selection typically favors selfish behavior which is not socially optimal. Here we study the evolution of cooperation in three exemplars of key social dilemmas, representing the prisoner’s dilemma, hawk-dove and coordination classes of games, in structured populations defined by complex networks. Using individual-based simulations of the games on model and empirical networks, we give a detailed comparative study of the effects of the structural properties of a network, such as its average degree, variance in degree distribution, clustering coefficient, and assortativity coefficient, on the promotion of cooperative behavior in all three classes of games.Author Summary: Social dilemmas embody the tension between individual self-interest on the one hand and the public good on the other that underlie many of the greatest challenges facing human and animal societies, such as the maintenance of altruism and the responsible use of common resources. Understanding the mechanisms through which cooperative, socially optimal, behavior can be established in social dilemmas is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology and in many areas of the social sciences. Here we study how cooperative behavior can emerge in three key social dilemmas—known as the donation game, snowdrift game and sculling game—when interactions between individuals form a network. We show that in all three social dilemmas significantly higher levels of cooperative behavior typically emerge in such a situation as compared to what would be the case in the absence of any network structure. In particular, we show that certain structural properties that are common in real-world social networks have a significant effect in increasing the level of cooperative behavior that is present in all three social dilemmas.

Date: 2016
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pcbi00:1004779

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004779

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