Evolution of coordination in scale-free and small world networks under information diffusion constraints

Abstract

We study evolution of coordination in social systems by simulating a coordination game in an ensemble of scale-free and small-world networks and comparing the results. We give particular emphasis to the role information about the pay-offs of neighbours plays in nodes adapting strategies, by limiting this information up to various levels. We find that if nodes have no chance to evolutionarily adapt, then non-coordination is a better strategy, however when nodes adapt based on information of the neighbour payoffs, coordination quickly emerges as the better strategy. We find phase transitions in number of coordinators with respect to the relative pay-off of coordination, and these phase transitions are sharper in small-world networks. We also find that when pay-off information of neighbours is limited, small-world networks are able to better cope with this limitation than scale-free networks. We observe that provincial hubs are the quickest to evolutionarily adapt strategies, in both scale-free and small world networks. Our findings confirm that evolutionary tendencies of coordination heavily depend on network topology.