Nodes having a major influence to break cooperation define a novel centrality measure: game centrality

TL;DR

This paper introduces 'game centrality', a new measure to identify nodes that can disrupt cooperation in networks, validated on social and protein networks, with potential applications in medicine and social sciences.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel centrality measure called 'game centrality' and a simulation tool 'NetworGame' to analyze the influence of nodes on cooperation across various networks.

Findings

Hubs and party hubs significantly influence cooperation breakdown.

Nodes in intra-protein signaling pathways have high influence.

Game centrality effectively predicts influential nodes in complex systems.

Abstract

Cooperation played a significant role in the self-organization and evolution of living organisms. Both network topology and the initial position of cooperators heavily affect the cooperation of social dilemma games. We developed a novel simulation program package, called 'NetworGame', which is able to simulate any type of social dilemma games on any model, or real world networks with any assignment of initial cooperation or defection strategies to network nodes. The ability of initially defecting single nodes to break overall cooperation was called as 'game centrality'. The efficiency of this measure was verified on well-known social networks, and was extended to 'protein games', i.e. the simulation of cooperation between proteins, or their amino acids. Hubs and in particular, party hubs of yeast protein-protein interaction networks had a large influence to convert the cooperation of other nodes to defection. Simulations on methionyl-tRNA synthetase protein structure network indicated an increased influence of nodes belonging to intra-protein signaling pathways on breaking cooperation. The efficiency of single, initially defecting nodes to convert the cooperation of other nodes to defection in social dilemma games may be an important measure to predict the importance of nodes in the integration and regulation of complex systems. Game centrality may help to design more efficient interventions to cellular networks (in forms of drugs), to ecosystems and social networks. The NetworGame algorithm is downloadable from here: www.NetworGame.linkgroup.hu