82,023 research outputs found
The Role of Diverse Strategies in Sustainable Knowledge Production
Online communities are becoming increasingly important as platforms for
large-scale human cooperation. These communities allow users seeking and
sharing professional skills to solve problems collaboratively. To investigate
how users cooperate to complete a large number of knowledge-producing tasks, we
analyze StackExchange, one of the largest question and answer systems in the
world. We construct attention networks to model the growth of 110 communities
in the StackExchange system and quantify individual answering strategies using
the linking dynamics of attention networks. We identify two types of users
taking different strategies. One strategy (type A) aims at performing
maintenance by doing simple tasks, while the other strategy (type B) aims
investing time in doing challenging tasks. We find that the number of type A
needs to be twice as big as type B users for a sustainable growth of
communities.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure
Emergence of communities and diversity in social networks
Communities are common in complex networks and play a significant role in the functioning of social, biological, economic,
and technological systems. Despite widespread interest in detecting community structures in complex networks and exploring the
effect of communities on collective dynamics, a deep understanding of the emergence and prevalence of communities in social
networks is still lacking. Addressing this fundamental problem
is of paramount importance in understanding, predicting, and
controlling a variety of collective behaviors in society. An elusive question is how communities with common internal properties arise in social networks with great individual diversity. Here,
we answer this question using the ultimatum game, which has
been a paradigm for characterizing altruism and fairness. We
experimentally show that stable local communities with different
internal agreements emerge spontaneously and induce social
diversity into networks, which is in sharp contrast to populations with random interactions. Diverse communities and social
norms come from the interaction between responders with inherent heterogeneous demands and rational proposers via local connections, where the former eventually become the community
leaders. This result indicates that networks are significant in the
emergence and stabilization of communities and social diversity.
Our experimental results also provide valuable information about
strategies for developing network models and theories of evolutionary games and social dynamics.This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China under Grants 61573064, 71631002, 71401037, and 11301032; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and Beijing Nova Programme; and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Individual Discovery Grant). The Boston University work was supported by NSF Grants PHY-1505000, CMMI-1125290, and CHE- 1213217, and by Defense Threat Reduction Agency Grant HDTRA1-14-1-0017, and Department of Energy Contract DE-AC07-05Id14517. (61573064 - National Nature Science Foundation of China; 71631002 - National Nature Science Foundation of China; 71401037 - National Nature Science Foundation of China; 11301032 - National Nature Science Foundation of China; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and Beijing Nova Programme; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Individual Discovery Grant); PHY-1505000 - NSF; CMMI-1125290 - NSF; CHE-1213217 - NSF; HDTRA1-14-1-0017 - Defense Threat Reduction Agency; DE-AC07-05Id14517 - Department of Energy)Published versio
The Limits of Trust in Economic Transactions - Investigations of Perfect Reputation Systems
nonetrust, reputation systems, eBay
Coevolution of trustful buyers and cooperative sellers in the trust game
Many online marketplaces enjoy great success. Buyers and sellers in
successful markets carry out cooperative transactions even if they do not know
each other in advance and a moral hazard exists. An indispensable component
that enables cooperation in such social dilemma situations is the reputation
system. Under the reputation system, a buyer can avoid transacting with a
seller with a bad reputation. A transaction in online marketplaces is better
modeled by the trust game than other social dilemma games, including the
donation game and the prisoner's dilemma. In addition, most individuals
participate mostly as buyers or sellers; each individual does not play the two
roles with equal probability. Although the reputation mechanism is known to be
able to remove the moral hazard in games with asymmetric roles, competition
between different strategies and population dynamics of such a game are not
sufficiently understood. On the other hand, existing models of reputation-based
cooperation, also known as indirect reciprocity, are based on the symmetric
donation game. We analyze the trust game with two fixed roles, where trustees
(i.e., sellers) but not investors (i.e., buyers) possess reputation scores. We
study the equilibria and the replicator dynamics of the game. We show that the
reputation mechanism enables cooperation between unacquainted buyers and
sellers under fairly generous conditions, even when such a cooperative
equilibrium coexists with an asocial equilibrium in which buyers do not buy and
sellers cheat. In addition, we show that not many buyers may care about the
seller's reputation under cooperative equilibrium. Buyers' trusting behavior
and sellers' reputation-driven cooperative behavior coevolve to alleviate the
social dilemma.Comment: 5 figure
the cultural evolution of institutional religions
In recent work, Atran, Henrich, Norenzayan and colleagues developed an account of religion that reconciles insights from the âby-productâ accounts and the adaptive accounts. According to their synthesis, the process of cultural group selection driven by group competition has recruited our proclivity to adopt and spread religious beliefs and engage in religious practices to increase within group solidarity, harmony and cooperation. While their account has much merit, I believe it only tells us half the story of how institutional religions have evolved. Their cultural evolutionary account of religion only looks at the cultural dynamics arising from competition between groups, not at the dynamics arising from within the group. Drawing from game-theoretic analyses of the emergence and cultural evolution of social institutions, I outline two sets of important âwithin-groupâ dynamics that shape institutional religions. The first follow from the necessity to keep the interaction of the participants in an equilibrium state in order to maintain the social institution. The second arise from the competition of institutional features for traction within the group. Bringing these dynamics into account enables us to explain prominent features of institutional religions that cannot be satisfactorily explained by the current model of the cultural evolution of religions
The impact of resource dependence of the mechanisms of life on the spatial population dynamics of an in silico microbial community
Biodiversity has a critical impact on ecosystem functionality and stability, and thus the current biodiversity crisis has motivated many studies of the mechanisms that sustain biodiversity, a notable example being non-transitive or cyclic competition. We therefore extend existing microscopic models of communities with cyclic competition by incorporating resource dependence in demographic processes, characteristics of natural systems often oversimplified or overlooked by modellers. The spatially explicit nature of our individual-based model of three interacting species results in the formation of stable spatial structures, which have significant effects on community functioning, in agreement with experimental observations of pattern formation in microbial communities. Published by AIP Publishing
Social dilemmas in an online social network: the structure and evolution of cooperation
We investigate two paradigms for studying the evolution of
cooperation--Prisoner's Dilemma and Snowdrift game in an online friendship
network obtained from a social networking site. We demonstrate that such social
network has small-world property and degree distribution has a power-law tail.
Besides, it has hierarchical organizations and exhibits disassortative mixing
pattern. We study the evolutionary version of the two types of games on it. It
is found that enhancement and sustainment of cooperative behaviors are
attributable to the underlying network topological organization. It is also
shown that cooperators can survive when confronted with the invasion of
defectors throughout the entire ranges of parameters of both games. The
evolution of cooperation on empirical networks is influenced by various network
effects in a combined manner, compared with that on model networks. Our results
can help understand the cooperative behaviors in human groups and society.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure
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Chris Cannings: A Life in Games
Chris Cannings was one of the pioneers of evolutionary game theory. His early work was inspired by the formulations of John Maynard Smith, Geoff Parker and Geoff Price; Chris recognized the need for a strong mathematical foundation both to validate stated results and to give a basis for extensions of the models. He was responsible for fundamental results on matrix games, as well as much of the theory of the important war of attrition game, patterns of evolutionarily stable strategies, multiplayer games and games on networks. In this paper we describe his work, key insights and their influence on research by others in this increasingly important field. Chris made substantial contributions to other areas such as population genetics and segregation analysis, but it was to games that he always returned. This review is written by three of his students from different stages of his career
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