No Arabic abstract
Evolutionary game theory is employed to study topological conditions of scale-free networks for the evolution of cooperation. We show that Apollonian Networks (ANs) are perfect scale-free networks, on which cooperation can spread to all individuals, even though there are initially only 3 or 4 hubs occupied by cooperators and all the others by defectors. Local topological features such as degree, clustering coefficient, gradient as well as topology potential are adopted to analyze the advantages of ANs in cooperation enhancement. Furthermore, a degree-skeleton underlying ANs is uncovered for understanding the cooperation diffusion. Constructing this kind degree-skeleton for random scale-free networks promotes cooperation level close to that of Barabasi-Albert networks, which gives deeper insights into the origin of the latter on organization and further promotion of cooperation.
How cooperation emerges in human societies is still a puzzle. Evolutionary game theory has been the standard framework to address this issue. In most models, every individual plays with all others, and then reproduce and die according to what they earn. This amounts to assuming that selection takes place at a slow pace with respect to the interaction time scale. We show that, quite generally, if selection speeds up, the evolution outcome changes dramatically. Thus, in games such as Harmony, where cooperation is the only equilibrium and the only rational outcome, rapid selection leads to dominance of defectors. Similar non trivial phenomena arise in other binary games and even in more complicated settings such as the Ultimatum game. We conclude that the rate of selection is a key element to understand and model the emergence of cooperation, and one that has so far been overlooked.
Networks with a scale-free degree distribution are widely thought to promote cooperation in various games. Herein, by studying the well-known prisoners dilemma game, we demonstrate that this need not necessarily be true. For the very same degree sequence and degree distribution, we present a variety of possible behaviour. We reassess the perceived importance of hubs in a network towards the maintenance of cooperation. We also reevaluate the dependence of cooperation on network clustering and assortativity.
Public health services are constantly searching for new ways to reduce the spread of infectious diseases, such as public vaccination of asymptomatic individuals, quarantine (isolation) and treatment of symptomatic individuals. Epidemic models have a long history of assisting in public health planning and policy making. In this paper, we introduce epidemic models including variable population size, degree-related imperfect vaccination and quarantine on scale-free networks. More specifically, the models are formulated both on the population with and without permanent natural immunity to infection, which corresponds respectively to the susceptible-vaccinated-infected-quarantined-recovered (SVIQR) model and the susceptible-vaccinated-infected-quarantined (SVIQS) model. We develop different mathematical methods and techniques to study the dynamics of two models, including the basic reproduction number, the global stability of disease-free and endemic equilibria. For the SVIQR model, we show that the system exhibits a forward bifurcation. Meanwhile, the disease-free and unique endemic equilibria are shown to be globally asymptotically stable by constructing suitable Lyapunov functions. For the SVIQS model, conditions ensuring the occurrence of multiple endemic equilibria are derived. Under certain conditions, this system cannot undergo a backward bifurcation. The global asymptotical stability of disease-free equilibrium, and the persistence of the disease are proved. The endemic equilibrium is shown to be globally attractive by using monotone iterative technique. Finally, stochastic network simulations yield quantitative agreement with the deterministic mean-field approach.
Cooperative interactions pervade the dynamics of a broad rage of many-body systems, such as ecological communities, the organization of social structures, and economic webs. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of a simple population model that is driven by cooperative and symmetric interactions between two species. We develop a mean-field and a stochastic description for this cooperative two-species reaction scheme. For an isolated population, we determine the probability to reach a state of fixation, where only one species survives, as a function of the initial concentrations of the two species. We also determine the time to reach the fixation state. When each species can migrate into the population and replace a randomly selected individual, the population reaches a steady state. We show that this steady-state distribution undergoes a unimodal to trimodal transition as the migration rate is decreased beyond a critical value. In this low-migration regime, the steady state is not truly steady, but instead fluctuates strongly between near-fixation states of the two species. The characteristic time scale of these fluctuations diverges as $lambda^{-1}$.
We study the evolutionary Prisoners Dilemma on two social networks obtained from actual relational data. We find very different cooperation levels on each of them that can not be easily understood in terms of global statistical properties of both networks. We claim that the result can be understood at the mesoscopic scale, by studying the community structure of the networks. We explain the dependence of the cooperation level on the temptation parameter in terms of the internal structure of the communities and their interconnections. We then test our results on community-structured, specifically designed artificial networks, finding perfect agreement with the observations in the real networks. Our results support the conclusion that studies of evolutionary games on model networks and their interpretation in terms of global properties may not be sufficient to study specific, real social systems. In addition, the community perspective may be helpful to interpret the origin and behavior of existing networks as well as to design structures that show resilient cooperative behavior.