Related papers: Source-sink cooperation dynamics constrain institu…

People tend to have their social interactions with members of their own community. Such group-structured interactions can have a profound impact on the behaviors that evolve. Group structure affects the way people cooperate, and how they…

We show that fluid organizations display higher levels of cooperation than attainable by groups with either a fixed social structure or lacking one altogether. By moving within the organization, individuals cause restructurings that…

The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…

Theoretical models suggest that social networks influence the evolution of cooperation, but to date there have been few experimental studies. Observational data suggest that a wide variety of behaviors may spread in human social networks,…

Social institutions are systems of shared norms and rules that regulate people's behaviors, often emerging without external enforcement. They provide criteria to distinguish cooperation from defection and establish rules to sustain…

The development of cooperative relations within and between firms plays an important role in the successful implementation of business strategy. How to produce such relations is less well understood. We build on work in relational contract…

Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…

Social contagion has been studied in various contexts. Many instances of social contagion can be modeled as an infection process where a specific state (adoption of product, fad, knowledge, behavior, etc.) spreads from individual to…

Recent works suggest that pooling and sharing may constitute a fundamental mechanism for the evolution of cooperation in well-mixed fluctuating environments. The rationale is that, by reducing the amplitude of fluctuations, pooling and…

Homophily and social influence are the fundamental mechanisms that drive the evolution of attitudes, beliefs and behaviour within social groups. Homophily relates the similarity between pairs of individuals' attitudinal states to their…

Axelrod's model describes the dissemination of a set of cultural traits in a society constituted by individual agents. In a social context, nevertheless, individual choices toward a specific attitude are also at the basis of the formation…

Cooperation among unrelated individuals is frequently observed in social groups when their members combine efforts and resources to obtain a shared benefit that is unachievable by an individual alone. However, understanding why cooperation…

Decision-making societies may vary in their level of cooperation and degree of conservatism, both of which influence their overall performance. Moreover, these factors are not fixed -- they can change based on the decisions agents in the…

A local culture denotes a commonly shared behaviour within a cluster of firms. Similar to social norms or conventions, it is an emergent feature resulting from the firms' interaction in an economic network. To model these dynamics, we…

We present a detailed model of collaboration in communities of practice and we examine its dynamical consequences for the group as a whole. We establish the existence of a novel mechanism that allows the community to naturally adapt to…

In some systems, the behavior of the constituent units can create a `context' that modifies the direct interactions among them. This mechanism of indirect modification inspired us to develop a minimal model of context-dependent spreading.…

The advent and proliferation of social media have led to the development of mathematical models describing the evolution of beliefs/opinions in an ecosystem composed of socially interacting users. The goal is to gain insights into…

Social groups with widely different music tastes, political convictions, and religious beliefs emerge and disappear on scales from extreme subcultures to mainstream mass-cultures. Both the underlying social structure and the formation of…

How producers of public goods persist in microbial communities is a major question in evolutionary biology. Cooperation is evolutionarily unstable, since cheating strains can reproduce quicker and take over. Spatial structure has been shown…

Fluctuating environments are situations where the spatio-temporal stochasticity plays a significant role in the evolutionary dynamics. The study of the evolution of cooperation in these environments typically assumes a homogeneous, well…