Robustness of cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma in complex networks

J. Poncela, J. Gómez-Gardeñes, L.M. Floría, Y. Moreno
NEW JOURNAL OF PHYSICS 9,  184 (2007)
Times cited: 94
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Abstract

Recent studies on the evolutionary dynamics of the prisoner’s
dilemma game in scale-free networks have demonstrated that the heterogeneity of
the network interconnections enhances the evolutionary success of cooperation. In
this paper we address the issue of how the characterization of the asymptotic states
of the evolutionary dynamics depends on the initial concentration of cooperators.
We find that the measure and the connectedness properties of the set of nodes
where cooperation reaches fixation is largely independent of initial conditions, in
contrast with the behavior of both the set of nodes where defection is fixed, and
the fluctuating nodes. We also check for the robustness of these results when
varying the degree heterogeneity along a one-parametric family of networks
interpolating between the class of Erdos–Renyi graphs and the Barabási–Albert
networks.