What makes people cooperate when facing social dilemmas—especially in complex group settings? A new study led by Onkar Sadekar, Federico Battiston, and co-authors, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, explores this question by bringing fresh realism to models of group interactions on higher-order networks.
In earlier work, the team demonstrated that higher-order interactions—beyond simple pairwise connections—can already promote cooperation. But those models relied on two strong simplifications:
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Individuals were assumed to use the same strategy across all group sizes.
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Different types of group interactions were treated as structurally separate.
This new study introduces a more nuanced model, allowing:
- individuals to adapt their strategy depending on the group size,
- structural overlap between different types of interactions,
- and coupled dynamics across multiple levels of interaction.
The Findings
These features significantly enhance cooperation—especially when networks have higher structural overlap.
Beyond the technical contributions, the paper deepens the link between evolutionary game theory and the theory of higher-order networks—a vibrant, emerging area in network science.
Read the full article here.