Promote cooperation by localised small-world communication

¹  Institute of Theoretical Physics, Lanzhou University - Lanzhou Gansu 730000, China
²  Departamento de Física da Universidade de Aveiro - 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal

Corresponding authors: huangzg03@lzu.cn yhwang@lzu.edu.cn

Received: 5 October 2007
Accepted: 6 November 2007

Abstract

The emergence and maintenance of cooperation within sizable groups of unrelated humans offer many challenges for our understanding. We propose that the humans' capacity of communication, such as how many and how far away the fellows can build up mutual communications, may affect the evolution of cooperation. We study this issue by means of the public goods game (PGG) with a two-layered network of contacts. Players obtain payoffs from five-person public goods interactions on a square lattice (the interaction layer). Also, they update strategies after communicating with neighbours in learning layer, where two players build up mutual communication with a power law probability depending on their spatial distance. Our simulation results indicate that the evolution of cooperation is indeed sensitive to how players choose others to communicate with, including the amount as well as the locations. The tendency of localised communication is proved to be a new mechanism to promote cooperation.