Evolving the asymmetry of the prisoner's dilemma game in adaptive social structures

Abstract

Empirical studies show that most real social networks exhibit both a significant average connectivity and marked heterogeneity. While the first precludes the emergence of cooperation in static networks, it has been recently shown that the latter induces a symmetry breaking of the game, as cooperative acts become dependent on the social context of the individual. Here we show how adaptive networks can give rise to such diversity in social contexts, creating sufficient conditions for cooperation to prevail as a result of a positive assortment of strategies and the emergence of a symmetry breaking of the game. We further show that realistic heterogeneous networks of high average connectivity where cooperation prevails can result from a simple topological dynamics. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.