Publication: Community connectivity and heterogeneity: clues and insights on cooperation on social networks
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ISSN: 1860-711X (print version)
ISSN: 1860-7128 (online version)
Publication date
2008-12
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Springer
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Abstract
While studies on the emergence of cooperation on structured populations
abound, only few of them have considered real social networks as the substrate on
which individuals interact. As has been shown recently [Lozano et al., PLoS ONE
3(4):e1892, 2008], understanding cooperative behavior on social networks requires
knowledge not only of their global (macroscopic) characteristic, but also a deep insight
on their community (mesoscopic) structure. In this paper, we look at this problem from
the viewpoint of the resilience of cooperation, in particular when there are directed
exogenous attacks (insertion of pure defectors) at key locations in the network. We present results of agent-based simulations showing strong evidence that the resilience
of social networks is crucially dependent on their community structure, ranging from
no resilience to robust cooperative behavior. Our results have important implications
for the understanding of how organizations work and can be used as a guide for
organization design.
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Keywords
Cooperation, Social networks, Community structure, Resilience, Prisoner's dilemma
Bibliographic citation
Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination, vol. 3, n. 2, december 2008. Pp. 183–199