Networks of artificial social interactions

Abstract

Evolution of cooperation is a fundamental question of socio-biology. Intrinsic factors like kinship play an important role in cooperation among selfish individuals. External factors like uncertainty and the structure of the social interaction network also contribute significantly to the evolution of cooperation. Here I use agent-based simulations to generate artificial social networks. I show that some of these networks have similar scale-free structure as real social networks. The analysis shows that having agents with memory and with the ability to share their memory through gossiping does not have a significant effect on the scale-free nature of simulated social networks. However the presence of high uncertainty in the cooperation games played by the agents is required for the generation of scale-free social interaction networks. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.