Interplay between evolutionary game and network structure: the coevolution of social net, cooperation and wealth

Abstract

We study the interplay between evolutionary game and network structure and show how the dynamics of the game affect the growth pattern of the network and how the evolution of the network influence the cooperative behavior in the game. Simulation results show that the payoff-based preferential attachment mechanism leads to the emergence of a scale-free structural property, $P(k)\sim k^{-γ}$. Moreover, we investigate the average path length and the assortative mixing features. The obtained results indicate that the network has small-world and positive assortative behaviors, which are consistent with the observations of some real social networks. In parallel, we found that the evolution of the underlying network structure effectively promotes the cooperation level of the game. We also investigate the wealth distribution obtained by our model, which is consistent with the Pareto law in the real observation. In addition, the analysis of the generated scale-free network structure is provided for better understanding the evolutionary dynamics of our model.