8 research outputs found
Coevolution of teaching activity promotes cooperation
Evolutionary games are studied where the teaching activity of players can
evolve in time. Initially all players following either the cooperative or
defecting strategy are distributed on a square lattice. The rate of strategy
adoption is determined by the payoff difference and a teaching activity
characterizing the donor's capability to enforce its strategy on the opponent.
Each successful strategy adoption process is accompanied with an increase in
the donor's teaching activity. By applying an optimum value of the increment
this simple mechanism spontaneously creates relevant inhomogeneities in the
teaching activities that support the maintenance of cooperation for both the
prisoner's dilemma and the snowdrift game.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures; accepted for publication in New Journal of
Physic
Patterns of cooperation: fairness and coordination in networks of interacting agents
We study the self-assembly of a complex network of collaborations among
self-interested agents. The agents can maintain different levels of cooperation
with different partners. Further, they continuously, selectively, and
independently adapt the amount of resources allocated to each of their
collaborations in order to maximize the obtained payoff. We show analytically
that the system approaches a state in which the agents make identical
investments, and links produce identical benefits. Despite this high degree of
social coordination some agents manage to secure privileged topological
positions in the network enabling them to extract high payoffs. Our analytical
investigations provide a rationale for the emergence of unidirectional
non-reciprocal collaborations and different responses to the withdrawal of a
partner from an interaction that have been reported in the psychological
literature.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure
Dynamics in online social networks
An increasing number of today's social interactions occurs using online
social media as communication channels. Some online social networks have become
extremely popular in the last decade. They differ among themselves in the
character of the service they provide to online users. For instance, Facebook
can be seen mainly as a platform for keeping in touch with close friends and
relatives, Twitter is used to propagate and receive news, LinkedIn facilitates
the maintenance of professional contacts, Flickr gathers amateurs and
professionals of photography, etc. Albeit different, all these online platforms
share an ingredient that pervades all their applications. There exists an
underlying social network that allows their users to keep in touch with each
other and helps to engage them in common activities or interactions leading to
a better fulfillment of the service's purposes. This is the reason why these
platforms share a good number of functionalities, e.g., personal communication
channels, broadcasted status updates, easy one-step information sharing, news
feeds exposing broadcasted content, etc. As a result, online social networks
are an interesting field to study an online social behavior that seems to be
generic among the different online services. Since at the bottom of these
services lays a network of declared relations and the basic interactions in
these platforms tend to be pairwise, a natural methodology for studying these
systems is provided by network science. In this chapter we describe some of the
results of research studies on the structure, dynamics and social activity in
online social networks. We present them in the interdisciplinary context of
network science, sociological studies and computer science.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, book chapte
Analyzing and Modeling Real-World Phenomena with Complex Networks: A Survey of Applications
The success of new scientific areas can be assessed by their potential for
contributing to new theoretical approaches and in applications to real-world
problems. Complex networks have fared extremely well in both of these aspects,
with their sound theoretical basis developed over the years and with a variety
of applications. In this survey, we analyze the applications of complex
networks to real-world problems and data, with emphasis in representation,
analysis and modeling, after an introduction to the main concepts and models. A
diversity of phenomena are surveyed, which may be classified into no less than
22 areas, providing a clear indication of the impact of the field of complex
networks.Comment: 103 pages, 3 figures and 7 tables. A working manuscript, suggestions
are welcome
Coevolving agent strategies and network topology for the public goods games
Much of human cooperation remains an evolutionary riddle. Coevolutionary public goods games in structured populations are studied where players can change from an unproductive public goods game to a productive one, by evaluating the productivity of the public goods games. In our model, each individual participates in games organized by its neighborhood plus by itself. Coevolution here refers to an evolutionary process entailing both deletion of existing links and addition of new links between agents that accompanies the evolution of their strategies. Furthermore, we investigate the effects of time scale separation of strategy and structure on cooperation level. This study presents the following: Foremost, we observe that high cooperation levels in public goods interactions are attained by the entangled coevolution of strategy and structure. Presented results also confirm that the resulting networks show many features of real systems, such as cooperative behavior and hierarchical clustering. The heterogeneity of the interaction network is held responsible for the observed promotion of cooperation. We hope our work may offer an explanation for the origin of large-scale cooperative behavior among unrelated individuals. Copyright EDP Sciences, SIF, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011