Emergence of Cooperation in N-player games on small world networks

The emergence of cooperation in social dilemmas has been addressed in a number of fields. In this paper, we illustrate how robust cooperation can emerge among a population of agents participating in a N-player dilemma when the agents are spatially arranged on a graph exhibiting small world properties. We present a graph structure with a high level of community structure, small diameter and a variance in the node degree distribution. We show that with simple learning rules, robust cooperation emerges. We also show that a population of agents whose interactions are constrained by such a graph can adapt to dramatic environmental changes.