Iterated N-player games on small-world networks

The evolution of strategies in iterated multi-player social dilemma games is studied on small-world networks. Two different games with varying reward values - the N-player Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (N-IPD) and the N-player Iterated Snowdrift game (N-ISD) - form the basis of this study. Here, the agents playing the game are mapped to the nodes of different network architectures, ranging from regular lattices to small-world networks and random graphs. In a given game instance, the focal agent participates in an iterative game with N - 1 other agents drawn from its local neighbourhood. We use a genetic algorithm with synchronous updating to evolve agent strategies. Extensive Monte Carlo simulation experiments show that for smaller cost-to-benefit ratios, the extent of cooperation in both games decreases as the probability of re-wiring increases. For higher cost-to-benefit ratios, when the re-wiring probability is small we observe an increase in the level of cooperation in the N-IPD population, but not the N-ISD population. This suggests that the small-world network structure with small re-wiring probabilities can both promote and maintain higher levels of cooperation when the game becomes more challenging