Cooperation-dominant Situations in Meta-rewards Games on WS- and BA-model Networks

Abstract

We investigate the conditions in which cooperation is dominant in social media using the models of evolutionary games of public goods games and try to clarify the mechanisms that social media thrive. Situation that cooperation is dominant corresponds to that in which posting articles and taking reactions by comment etc. result in some benefits than do nothing as free-riders. Thus, we can say that the social media thrive. It is, however, hard to foresee whether the current popular social media continue to thrive or whether new social media become to thrive in the future. A number of studies examined situations that cooperation is dominant by using the public goods game. However, they assume that users are connected with complete graph as the network structures, which are far from the actual network structures. Thus, we conducted the simulation experiments to identify the cooperation-dominant situations in two network models, WS and BA models, which are said to be close to real networks. We show the differences in the mechanisms for keeping social media thriving in these networks. Our results indicated that in the WS-model networks, the results were quite similar with those of completed graph. However, the BA model exhibited quite different characteristics and thriving conditions were relatively easier in BA-model networks than in others.