Topological traps control flow on real networks: the case of coordination failures

We study evolutionary games in real social networks, with a focus on coordination games. We find that populations fail to coordinate in the same behavior for a wide range of parameters, a novel phenomenon not observed in most artificial model networks. We show that this result arises from the relevance of correlations beyond the first neighborhood, in particular from topological traps formed by links between nodes of different degrees in regions with few or no redundant paths. This specificity of real networks has not been modeled so far with synthetic networks. We thus conclude that model networks must be improved to include these mesoscopic structures, in order to successfully address issues such as the emergence of cooperation in real societies. We finally show that topological traps are a very generic phenomenon that may arise in very many different networks and fields, such as opinion models, spread of diseases or ecological networks.This work was partially supported by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacio´n (Spain) through Grants MOSAICO (to C.P.R. and A.S.), FIS2009 13730 C02 02 (to A.A.), by Comunidad de Madrid (Spain) through Grant MODELICO CM (to A.S.) and by Generalitat de Catalunya (Spain) through Grant 2009 SGR 838. S.L. was partially supported by the Future and Emerging Technologies programme FP7 COSI ICT of the European Commission through project QLectives (grant no. 231200)Publicad