Dresden 2009 – scientific programme

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AGSOE: Arbeitsgruppe Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

AGSOE 12: Economic Models and Evolutionary Game Theory IV

AGSOE 12.2: Talk

Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 14:30–15:00, BAR 205

What is the effect of networks on cooperation? Lack of universality in evolutionary game theory on graphs. — Carlos P. Roca^1,2, Sergi Lozano¹, José A. Cuesta², Alex Arenas^3,4, and •Angel Sánchez^3,4,5 — ¹SOMS, ETH Zürich, Switzerland — ²GISC, U. Carlos III, Madrid, Spain — ³U. Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain — ⁴BIFI, Zaragoza, Spain — ⁵ICMAT, CSIC-UAM-UC3M-UCM, Madrid, Spain

In the past few years much work has been devoted to the study of the emergence of cooperation by considering evolutionary games among individuals whose interactions are governed by a network. This line of research has produced interesting and inspiring results; however, a complete picture of the observed phenomenology and the mechanisms behind it is lacking. In this talk, we provide evidence that such a complete picture can not be found because evolutionary game theory on graphs is highly non-universal. Extensive simulations allow us to conclude that the enhancement or inhibition of cooperation strongly depends on the type of network, the type of evolutionary dynamics and the social dilemma under study. Furthermore, the phenomenology observed in real social networks may be considerably different from the results of this kind of models. In particular, the existence of a mesoscopic level of organization can not be neglected. Our main conclusion is that modeling the emergence of cooperation in a sensible way requires looking at a wide range of social dilemmas and not at a particular one, and that this research should always have in mind a specific context for application because of the lack of universality.