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Two Species Evolutionary Game Model of User and Moderator Dynamics
We construct a two species evolutionary game model of an online society
consisting of ordinary users and behavior enforcers (moderators). Among
themselves, moderators play a coordination game choosing between being
"positive" or "negative" (or harsh) while ordinary users play prisoner's
dilemma. When interacting, moderators motivate good behavior (cooperation)
among the users through punitive actions while the moderators themselves are
encouraged or discouraged in their strategic choice by these interactions. We
show the following results: (i) We show that the -limit set of the
proposed system is sensitive both to the degree of punishment and the
proportion of moderators in closed form. (ii) We demonstrate that the basin of
attraction for the Pareto optimal strategy
can be computed exactly. (iii) We demonstrate that for certain initial
conditions the system is self-regulating. These results partially explain the
stability of many online users communities such as Reddit. We illustrate our
results with examples from this online system.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, submitted to 2012 ASE Conference on Social
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