The ecology of social interactions in online and offline environments

TL;DR

This paper investigates how online and offline social interactions influence collective well-being, revealing that self-protective behaviors can lead to suboptimal social states in a game-theoretic framework.

Contribution

It introduces an evolutionary game model to analyze the impact of social strategies on offline and online interactions and their collective outcomes.

Findings

Self-protective behaviors can lead to non-socially optimal states

Online socialization influences offline interaction dynamics

Strategies of socialization affect collective well-being

Abstract

The rise in online social networking has brought about a revolution in social relations. However, its effects on offline interactions and its implications for collective well-being are still not clear and are under-investigated. We study the ecology of online and offline interaction in an evolutionary game framework where individuals can adopt different strategies of socialization. Our main result is that the spreading of self-protective behaviors to cope with hostile social environments can lead the economy to non-socially optimal stationary states.