Influence of topology in the evolution of coordination in complex networks under information diffusion constraints

Abstract

In this paper, we study the influence of the topological structure of social systems on the evolution of coordination in them. We simulate a coordination game (“Stag-hunt”) on four well-known classes of complex networks commonly used to model social systems, namely scale-free, small-world, random and hierarchical-modular, as well as on the well-mixed model. Our particular focus is on understanding the impact of information diffusion on coordination, and how this impact varies according to the topology of the social system. We demonstrate that while time-lags and noise in the information about relative payoffs affect the emergence of coordination in all social systems, some topologies are markedly more resilient than others to these effects. We also show that, while non-coordination may be a better strategy in a society where people do not have information about the payoffs of others, coordination will quickly emerge as the better strategy when people get this information about others, even with noise and time lags. Societies with the so-called small-world structure are most conducive to the emergence of coordination, despite limitations in information propagation, while societies with scale-free topologies are most sensitive to noise and time-lags in information diffusion. Surprisingly, in all topologies, it is not the highest connected people (hubs), but the slightly less connected people (provincial hubs) who first adopt coordination. Our findings confirm that the evolution of coordination in social systems depends heavily on the underlying social network structure.