Dynamics of Cooperation in Minority Games in Alliance Networks

Alliance networks are the underlying structures of social systems in business, management, and society. The sustainability and dynamics of a social system rely on the structural evolutions of the topologies. Understanding the evolution sheds light on the dynamics and sustainability of a social system. Minority game models have been successfully applied across social science, economy, management, and engineering. They provide simple yet applicable modeling to articulate the evolutionary cooperation dynamics of competitive players in binary decision situations. By extending the minority games played in alliance networks, the cooperation in structured systems of different network topologies is analyzed. In this model, local and global score strategies are considered with and without cooperation rewiring options. The cooperation level, the score, and the topological properties are investigated. The research uses a numerical simulation approach on random networks, scale-free networks, and small-world networks. The results suggest that the network rewiring strategy leads to higher systemic performance with a higher score and a higher level of stability in decision-making. Competitive decision-making can lead to a higher level of cooperation from a poor initial start. However, stubbornness in decision-making can lead to a poor situation when cooperation is discouraged. Players with local or global information adopt local and global score strategies. The results show that local strategies might lead to imbalance, while a global strategy might achieve a relatively stable outcome. This work contributes to bridge minority games in structured networks to study the cooperation between formation and evolution, and calls for future minority game modeling on social networks.