title: Conformity hinders the evolution of cooperation on scale-free networks.
abstract: We study the effects of conformity, the tendency of humans to imitate locally common behaviors, in the evolution of cooperation when individuals occupy the vertices of a graph and engage in the one-shot prisoner's dilemma or the snowdrift game with their neighbors. Two different graphs are studied: rings (one-dimensional lattices with cyclic boundary conditions) and scale-free networks of the Barabási-Albert type. The proposed evolutionary-graph model is studied both by means of Monte Carlo simulations and an extended pair-approximation technique. We find improved levels of cooperation when evolution is carried on rings and individuals imitate according to both the traditional payoff bias and a conformist bias. More importantly, we show that scale-free networks are no longer powerful amplifiers of cooperation when fair amounts of conformity are introduced in the imitation rules of the players. Such weakening of the cooperation-promoting abilities of scale-free networks is the result of a less biased flow of information in scale-free topologies, making hubs more susceptible of being influenced by less-connected neighbors.
authors: Institute of Applied Mathematics, University of Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. jorge.pena@unil.ch
authors: Jorge
authors: J
authors: Peña
authors: Henri
authors: H
authors: Volken
authors: Enea
authors: E
authors: Pestelacci
authors: Marco
authors: M
authors: Tomassini