Eur. Phys. J. B 56, 367-372 (2007)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2007-00124-5

Evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma on heterogeneous Newman-Watts small-world network

Center for Systems and Control, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, P.R. China

Corresponding authors: ^a fufeng@pku.edu.cn - ^b longwang@pku.edu.cn

Received: 5 December 2006
Revised: 28 March 2007
Published online: 11 May 2007

Abstract

We focus on the heterogeneity of social networks and its role to the emergence of prevailing cooperators and sustainable cooperation. The social networks are representative of the interaction relationships between players and their encounters in each round of games. We study an evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma game on a variant of Newman-Watts small-world network, whose heterogeneity can be tuned by a parameter. It is found that optimal cooperation level exists at some intermediate topological heterogeneity for different temptations to defect. That is, frequency of cooperators peaks at a certain specific value of degree heterogeneity — neither the most heterogeneous case nor the most homogeneous one would favor the cooperators. Besides, the average degree of networks and the adopted update rule also affect the cooperation level.