Prisoners’ dilemma in real-world acquaintance networks: Spikes and quasiequilibria induced by the interplay between structure and dynamics

We study Nowak and May’s spatial prisoners’ dilemma game driven by mutations (random choices of suboptimal strategies) on empirical social networks. The time evolution of the cooperation level is highly complex containing spikes and steps between quasistable levels. A statistical characterization of the quasistable states and a study of the mechanisms behind the steps are given. We argue that the crucial structural ingredients causing the observed behavior is an inhomogeneous degree distribution and that the connections within vertices of highest degree are rather sparse. Based on these observations we construct model networks with a similar complex time evolution of the cooperation level.