Strategic tradeoffs in competitor dynamics on adaptive networks

TL;DR

This paper explores how adaptive social networks influence competitor strategies, revealing paradoxical behaviors and complex dynamics that resemble evolutionary game theory, with implications for understanding online political debates.

Contribution

It introduces a model linking network structure to competitor strategies, demonstrating paradoxical and non-transitive dynamics in multi-competitor systems.

Findings

Tradeoffs between aggressiveness and defensiveness create paradoxical behaviors.

Three-competitor systems lack a stable optimal strategy.

Social network structures can be mapped to payoff matrices.

Abstract

Recent empirical work highlights the heterogeneity of social competitions such as political campaigns: proponents of some ideologies seek debate and conversation, others create echo chambers. While symmetric and static network structure is typically used as a substrate to study such competitor dynamics, network structure can instead be interpreted as a signature of the competitor strategies, yielding competition dynamics on adaptive networks. Here we demonstrate that tradeoffs between aggressiveness and defensiveness (i.e., targeting adversaries vs. targeting like-minded individuals) creates paradoxical behaviour such as non-transitive dynamics. And while there is an optimal strategy in a two competitor system, three competitor systems have no such solution; the introduction of extreme strategies can easily affect the outcome of a competition, even if the extreme strategies have no chance of winning. Not only are these results reminiscent of classic paradoxical results from evolutionary game theory, but the structure of social networks created by our model can be mapped to particular forms of payoff matrices. Consequently, social structure can act as a measurable metric for social games which in turn allows us to provide a game theoretical perspective on online political debates.