Recent empirical work highlights the heterogeneity of social competitions
such as political campaigns: proponents of some ideologies seek debate and
conversation, others create echo chambers. While symmetric and static network
structure is typically used as a substrate to study such competitor dynamics,
network structure can instead be interpreted as a signature of the competitor
strategies, yielding competition dynamics on adaptive networks. Here we
demonstrate that tradeoffs between aggressiveness and defensiveness (i.e.,
targeting adversaries vs. targeting like-minded individuals) creates
paradoxical behaviour such as non-transitive dynamics. And while there is an
optimal strategy in a two competitor system, three competitor systems have no
such solution; the introduction of extreme strategies can easily affect the
outcome of a competition, even if the extreme strategies have no chance of
winning. Not only are these results reminiscent of classic paradoxical results
from evolutionary game theory, but the structure of social networks created by
our model can be mapped to particular forms of payoff matrices. Consequently,
social structure can act as a measurable metric for social games which in turn
allows us to provide a game theoretical perspective on online political
debates.Comment: 20 pages (11 pages for the main text and 9 pages of supplementary
material
