PD Games on Networks

We tend to interact with same people, day after day. Might this affect our behavior? In an abstract fashion, we look at this question. To model this repeated interaction with a small subset of the entire population we place agents on the nodes of a network and have them play a prisoners’ dilemma game exclusively with their neighbors. We then alter the payoffs of the game and the topology of the network to see if, when, and to what degree cooperation survives. We find widely divergent aggregate decisions across networks and across payoffs. But, there is commonality as well. It seems clear that some networks, or some organizational structures, are more conducive to fostering cooperation