Conformity hinders the evolution of cooperation on scale-free networks

Jorge Peña, Henri Volken, Enea Pestelacci, and Marco Tomassini
Phys. Rev. E 80, 016110 – Published 15 July 2009

Abstract

We study the effects of conformity, the tendency of humans to imitate locally common behaviors, in the evolution of cooperation when individuals occupy the vertices of a graph and engage in the one-shot prisoner’s dilemma or the snowdrift game with their neighbors. Two different graphs are studied: rings (one-dimensional lattices with cyclic boundary conditions) and scale-free networks of the Barabási-Albert type. The proposed evolutionary-graph model is studied both by means of Monte Carlo simulations and an extended pair-approximation technique. We find improved levels of cooperation when evolution is carried on rings and individuals imitate according to both the traditional payoff bias and a conformist bias. More importantly, we show that scale-free networks are no longer powerful amplifiers of cooperation when fair amounts of conformity are introduced in the imitation rules of the players. Such weakening of the cooperation-promoting abilities of scale-free networks is the result of a less biased flow of information in scale-free topologies, making hubs more susceptible of being influenced by less-connected neighbors.

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  • Received 15 January 2009

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.80.016110

©2009 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Jorge Peña* and Henri Volken

  • Institute of Applied Mathematics, University of Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

Enea Pestelacci and Marco Tomassini§

  • Information Systems Institute, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

  • *jorge.pena@unil.ch
  • henri.volken@unil.ch
  • enea.pestelacci@unil.ch
  • §marco.tomassini@unil.ch

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Issue

Vol. 80, Iss. 1 — July 2009

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