Evolutionary games defined at the network mesoscale: The Public Goods game

The evolutionary dynamics of the Public Goods game addresses the emergence of cooperation within groups of individuals. However, the Public Goods game on large populations of interconnected individuals has been usually modeled without any knowledge about their group structure. In this paper, by focusing on collaboration networks, we show that it is possible to include the mesoscopic information about the structure of the real groups by means of a bipartite graph. We compare the results with the projected (coauthor) and the original bipartite graphs and show that cooperation is enhanced by the mesoscopic structure contained. We conclude by analyzing the influence of the size of the groups in the evolutionary success of cooperation. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3535579]