Disentangling social and group heterogeneities: Public Goods games on complex networks

¹ Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems, Universidad de Zaragoza E-50018 Zaragoza, Spain, EU
² Departamento de Física de la Materia Condensada, Universidad de Zaragoza - 50009 Zaragoza, Spain, EU
³ GISC and Departamento de Matemáticas, Universidad Carlos III - 28911 Leganés, Madrid, Spain, EU

^a gardenes@gmail.com

Received: 7 March 2011
Accepted: 1 August 2011

Abstract

In this letter we present a new perspective for the study of the Public Goods games on complex networks. The idea of our approach is to consider a realistic structure for the groups in which Public Goods games are played. Instead of assuming that the social network of contacts self-defines a group structure with identical topological properties, we disentangle these two interaction patterns so to deal with systems having groups of definite sizes embedded in social networks with a tunable degree of heterogeneity. Surpisingly, this realistic framework, reveals that social heterogeneity may not foster cooperation depending on the game setting and the updating rule.