Information cascades and the collapse of cooperation

In various types of structured communities newcomers choose their interaction partners by selecting a role-model and copying their social networks. Participants in these networks may be cooperators who contribute to the prosperity of the community, or cheaters who do not and simply exploit the coope...

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Main Authors: Yang, Guoli, Csikász-Nagy, Attila, Waites, William, Xiao, Gaoxi, Cavaliere, Matteo
Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2021
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Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/146116
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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spelling sg-ntu-dr.10356-1461162021-01-27T01:49:46Z Information cascades and the collapse of cooperation Yang, Guoli Csikász-Nagy, Attila Waites, William Xiao, Gaoxi Cavaliere, Matteo School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering Complex Networks Social Evolution In various types of structured communities newcomers choose their interaction partners by selecting a role-model and copying their social networks. Participants in these networks may be cooperators who contribute to the prosperity of the community, or cheaters who do not and simply exploit the cooperators. For newcomers it is beneficial to interact with cooperators but detrimental to interact with cheaters. However, cheaters and cooperators usually cannot be identified unambiguously and newcomers’ decisions are often based on a combination of private and public information. We use evolutionary game theory and dynamical networks to demonstrate how the specificity and sensitivity of those decisions can dramatically affect the resilience of cooperation in the community. We show that promiscuous decisions (high sensitivity, low specificity) are advantageous for cooperation when the strength of competition is weak; however, if competition is strong then the best decisions for cooperation are risk-adverse (low sensitivity, high specificity). Opportune decisions based on private and public information can still support cooperation but suffer of the presence of information cascades that damage cooperation, especially in the case of strong competition. Our research sheds light on the way the interplay of specificity and sensitivity in individual decision-making affects the resilience of cooperation in dynamical structured communities. Published version 2021-01-27T01:49:46Z 2021-01-27T01:49:46Z 2020 Journal Article Yang, G., Csikász-Nagy, A., Waites, W., Xiao, G., & Cavaliere, M. (2020). Information cascades and the collapse of cooperation. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 8004-. doi:10.1038/s41598-020-64800-z 2045-2322 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/146116 10.1038/s41598-020-64800-z 32409658 2-s2.0-85084730420 1 10 en Scientific Reports © 2020 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. application/pdf
institution Nanyang Technological University
building NTU Library
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider NTU Library
collection DR-NTU
language English
topic Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
Complex Networks
Social Evolution
spellingShingle Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
Complex Networks
Social Evolution
Yang, Guoli
Csikász-Nagy, Attila
Waites, William
Xiao, Gaoxi
Cavaliere, Matteo
Information cascades and the collapse of cooperation
description In various types of structured communities newcomers choose their interaction partners by selecting a role-model and copying their social networks. Participants in these networks may be cooperators who contribute to the prosperity of the community, or cheaters who do not and simply exploit the cooperators. For newcomers it is beneficial to interact with cooperators but detrimental to interact with cheaters. However, cheaters and cooperators usually cannot be identified unambiguously and newcomers’ decisions are often based on a combination of private and public information. We use evolutionary game theory and dynamical networks to demonstrate how the specificity and sensitivity of those decisions can dramatically affect the resilience of cooperation in the community. We show that promiscuous decisions (high sensitivity, low specificity) are advantageous for cooperation when the strength of competition is weak; however, if competition is strong then the best decisions for cooperation are risk-adverse (low sensitivity, high specificity). Opportune decisions based on private and public information can still support cooperation but suffer of the presence of information cascades that damage cooperation, especially in the case of strong competition. Our research sheds light on the way the interplay of specificity and sensitivity in individual decision-making affects the resilience of cooperation in dynamical structured communities.
author2 School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
author_facet School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Yang, Guoli
Csikász-Nagy, Attila
Waites, William
Xiao, Gaoxi
Cavaliere, Matteo
format Article
author Yang, Guoli
Csikász-Nagy, Attila
Waites, William
Xiao, Gaoxi
Cavaliere, Matteo
author_sort Yang, Guoli
title Information cascades and the collapse of cooperation
title_short Information cascades and the collapse of cooperation
title_full Information cascades and the collapse of cooperation
title_fullStr Information cascades and the collapse of cooperation
title_full_unstemmed Information cascades and the collapse of cooperation
title_sort information cascades and the collapse of cooperation
publishDate 2021
url https://hdl.handle.net/10356/146116
_version_ 1690658503953219584