title: Cascade of elimination and emergence of pure cooperation in coevolutionary games on networks.
abstract: We propose a coevolutionary game to study cooperative behavior in the presence of catastrophic phenomenon. We incorporate tolerance to elimination of individuals in network games where individuals update their strategies synchronously, and there are no birth of individuals and stochastic effects. We find that an avalanchelike death process can arise when defection strategies exist and individuals are vulnerable to deficiency of profits. Strikingly, we observe that, after such a cascading process terminates, cooperators are the sole survivors regardless of the game types and of the connection patterns among individuals as determined by the network topology. Cooperation thus becomes the optimal strategy and absolutely outperforms defection. Our results can yield insights into evolution of cooperation in the presence of catastrophic events in social and natural systems.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA.
authors.forename: Wen-Xu
authors.initials: WX
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Rui
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Ying-Cheng
authors.initials: YC
authors.lastname: Lai
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D003643:Death; D005246:Feedback; D005717:Games, Experimental; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008954:Models, Biological; D013315:Stress, Psychological; D013997:Time Factors