Environmentally Driven Migration in a Social Network Game
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep12481
In the article, an experiment was conducted to see how the payoffs for cooperative versus non-cooperative players compared in online social network games. The researchers found that by analyzing two separate games, they came to very similar conclusions. Although non-cooperators can take advantage of cooperators, which would suggest that the migration of the game would be towards defection and isolated players, it was discovered that cooperative players can find more success overall by utilizing group support and a more consistent stream of benefits. The gaming environments turned out to be ideal platforms for studying social network formation because the options for each player are widely variable and every action of the players can be tracked and recorded for comparison and data analysis.
Within their study, the researches directly used many of the ideas we have been discussing in class. They set up the study based around the formation of cooperative networks in such a way that groups of cooperative players would directly compete against themselves while also competing against the non-cooperative players, which can be modeled like the two player games we have looked at. In fact, they reference Prisoner’s Dilemma when deciding upon payoffs for each of the “players” involved in certain interactions. However, the wide array of options each player has, while still possessing a finite amount of time and resources within the game, creates more complicated games and often results in mixed strategy games. The researches isolated cooperation versus non-cooperation behaviors to assign probabilities, which then were used to calculate payoffs and equilibriums for the mixed strategy games. In some cases, when comparing two singular players, one of which was inclined to be cooperative and the other non-cooperative, pareto efficiency was achieved because of this opposition. This only occurred when one was cooperative and the other was not, as similar players were unable to recreate the same payoff structure.
It was quite interesting to see how the topics we have been covering in class, some only within the first week or so, are foundational in new research. Game theory being applied to video game interactions and the associated levels of cooperation to achieve higher payoffs is a very clever application of the very topics we are learning in Networks.