We study the spatial prisoner’s dilemma game where the players are located on the nodes of a random scale-free network. The prisoner’s dilemma game is a powerful tool and has been used for the study of mutual trust and cooperation among individuals in structured populations. We vary the...

We introduce a “gradient” to find out the defectors, and further a “topology potential” to characterize the individual’s strategy preference in the prisoner’s dilemma on scale-free networks. It is shown that the cooperators typically locate on the nodes with high topology potential...