title: Reputation drives cooperative behaviour and network formation in human groups.
abstract: Cooperativeness is a defining feature of human nature. Theoreticians have suggested several mechanisms to explain this ubiquitous phenomenon, including reciprocity, reputation, and punishment, but the problem is still unsolved. Here we show, through experiments conducted with groups of people playing an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma on a dynamic network, that it is reputation what really fosters cooperation. While this mechanism has already been observed in unstructured populations, we find that it acts equally when interactions are given by a network that players can reconfigure dynamically. Furthermore, our observations reveal that memory also drives the network formation process, and cooperators assort more, with longer link lifetimes, the longer the past actions record. Our analysis demonstrates, for the first time, that reputation can be very well quantified as a weighted mean of the fractions of past cooperative acts and the last action performed. This finding has potential applications in collaborative systems and e-commerce.
authors.affiliation: 1] Instituto de Biocomputación y Física de Sistemas Complejos (BIFI), Universidad de Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain [2] Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos (GISC), Departamento de Matemáticas, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Avenida de la Universidad 30, 28911 Leganés, Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Jose A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Cuesta
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Biocomputación y Física de Sistemas Complejos (BIFI), Universidad de Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain.
authors.forename: Carlos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Gracia-Lázaro
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Biocomputación y Física de Sistemas Complejos (BIFI), Universidad de Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain.
authors.forename: Alfredo
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ferrer
authors.affiliation: 1] Instituto de Biocomputación y Física de Sistemas Complejos (BIFI), Universidad de Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain [2] Departamento de Física Teórica, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Zaragoza, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain [3] Complex Networks and Systems Lagrange Lab, Institute for Scientific Interchange, Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Yamir
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Moreno
authors.affiliation: 1] Instituto de Biocomputación y Física de Sistemas Complejos (BIFI), Universidad de Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain [2] Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos (GISC), Departamento de Matemáticas, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Avenida de la Universidad 30, 28911 Leganés, Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Angel
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sánchez
mesh_terms: D003132:Commerce; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005716:Game Theory; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008568:Memory; D011678:Punishment