Evolutionary Games defined at the Network Mesoscale: The Public Goods game

TL;DR

This paper investigates how mesoscopic group structures in collaboration networks influence the evolution of cooperation in Public Goods games, revealing that detailed group information enhances cooperative behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a bipartite graph approach to incorporate mesoscopic group structure into Public Goods game models, improving understanding of cooperation dynamics.

Findings

Mesoscopic structure enhances cooperation levels.

Bipartite graphs better capture real group effects.

Group size influences evolutionary success.

Abstract

The evolutionary dynamics of the Public Goods game addresses the emergence of cooperation within groups of individuals. However, the Public Goods game on large populations of interconnected individuals has been usually modeled without any knowledge about their group structure. In this paper, by focusing on collaboration networks, we show that it is possible to include the mesoscopic information about the structure of the real groups by means of a bipartite graph. We compare the results with the projected (coauthor) and the original bipartite graphs and show that cooperation is enhanced by the mesoscopic structure contained. We conclude by analyzing the influence of the size of the groups in the evolutionary success of cooperation.