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

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 selfdefines 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.JG-G is supported by the MICINN through the Ramón y Cajal program and grants FIS2008-01240 and MTM2009-13838. DV is supported in part by a postdoctoral contract from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. AS was supported in part by grants MOSAICO and Complexity-NET RESINEE (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain) and MODELICO-CM (Comunidad de Madrid, Spain).Publicad