Related papers: The Gift That Keeps on Giving: Generosity is Conta…
Gifts are important instruments for forming bonds in interpersonal relationships. Our study analyzes the phenomenon of gift contagion in online groups. Gift contagion encourages social bonds by prompting further gifts; it may also promote…
Antisocial behavior can be contagious, spreading from individual to individual and rippling through social networks. Moreover, it can spread not only through third-party influence from observation, just like innovations or individual…
This paper examines how gifting spreads among viewers on Twitch, one of the largest live streaming platforms worldwide. Twitch users can give gift subscriptions to other viewers in the chat room, with the majority of gifters opting for…
This paper describes a basic model of a gift economy in the shape of a Giving Game and reveals the fundamental structure of such a game. Main result is that the game shows a community effect in that a small subgroup of players eventually…
The very notion of social network implies that linked individuals interact repeatedly with each other. This allows them not only to learn successful strategies and adapt to them, but also to condition their own behavior on the behavior of…
The success of modern civilization is built upon widespread cooperation in human society, deciphering the mechanisms behind has being a major goal for centuries. A crucial fact is, however, largely missing in most prior studies that games…
We consider agents in a social network competing to be selected as partners in collaborative, mutually beneficial activities. We study this through a model in which an agent i can initiate a limited number k_i>0 of games and selects the…
This article investigates selfish behavior in games where players are embedded in a social context. A framework is presented which allows us to measure the Windfall of Friendship, i.e., how much players benefit (compared to purely selfish…
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,…
Coordination is often critical to forming prosocial behaviors -- behaviors that increase the overall sum of rewards received by all agents in a multi-agent game. However, state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from…
We study proliferation of an action in binary action network coordination games that are generalized to include global effects. This captures important aspects of proliferation of a particular action or narrative in online social networks,…
Threshold-driven models and game theory are two fundamental paradigms for describing human interactions in social systems. However, in mimicking social contagion processes, models that simultaneously incorporate these two mechanisms have…
Young people worldwide are participating in ever-increasing numbers in online fan communities. Far from mere shallow repositories of pop culture, these sites are accumulating significant evidence that sophisticated informal learning is…
Resource sharing outside the kinship bonds is rare. Besides humans, it occurs in chimpanzee, wild dogs and hyenas as well as in vampire bats. Resource sharing is an instance of animal cooperation, where an animal gives away part of the…
Continuously changing environments have a paramount role in the evolution of cooperative behavior. Previous works have shown that the transitions among different games, as the feedback between behaviors and environments, can promote…
A longstanding idea in the literature on human cooperation is that cooperation should be reinforced when conditional cooperators are more likely to interact. In the context of social networks, this idea implies that cooperation should fare…
Cooperative behaviors are common in humans and are fundamental to our society. Theoretical and experimental studies have modeled environments in which the behaviors of humans, or agents, have been restricted to analyze their social…
We examine behavior in an experimental collaboration game that incorporates endogenous network formation. The environment is modeled as a generalization of the voluntary contributions mechanism. By varying the information structure in a…
A virtual plague is a process in which a behavior-affecting property spreads among characters in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG). The MMOG individuals constitute a synthetic population, and the game can be seen as a form of…
Human cooperation depends on indirect reciprocity. In this work, we explore the concept of indirect reciprocity using a donation game in an infinitely large population. In particular, we examine how updating the reputations of recipients…