Community reciprocity promotes cooperation in a network evolutionary prisoner’s dilemma game

Community structure is one of the most common features of complex networks and plays a crucial role in the game of strategy during an evolutionary process. Previous works focus on its physical characteristics of high cohesion and low coupling, we extend the existing research, by taking into consideration the capacity of communities to effectively manage and allocate resources through collective action, from a logical functional perspective. Based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game, we develop a new evolutionary model featuring community reciprocity. In particular, we assume that players could obtain the shared resources contributed by cooperators from communities with a certain probability, and the quantity of reciprocal resources players could reap depends on their positions in the community. Through intensive simulations on two famous synthetic networks with built-in community structure, the results show that community structure can provide enhanced reciprocity and promote the evolution of cooperation. The way that cooperation prospers is by occupying nodes with more advantageous positions within the community. Besides, the clarity of community structure mediates the promoting effect of community reciprocity on cooperation.