Cooperation-dominant Situations in SNS-norms Game on Complex and Facebook Networks

We propose an SNS-norms game to model behavioral strategies in social networking services (SNSs) and investigate the conditions required for the evolution of cooperation-dominant situations. SNSs such as Facebook and Google+ are indispensable social media for a variety of social communications ranging from personal chats to business and political campaigns, but we do not yet fully understand why they thrive and whether these currently popular SNSs will remain in the future. A number of studies have attempted to understand the conditions or mechanisms that keep social media thriving by using a meta-rewards game that is the dual form of a public goods game or by analyzing user roles. However, the meta-rewards game does not take into account the unique characteristics of current SNSs. Hence, in this work we propose an SNS-norms game that is an extension of Axelrod’s metanorms game, similar to meta-rewards games, but that considers the cost of commenting on an article and who is most likely to respond to it. We then experimentally investigated the conditions for a cooperation-dominant situation, by which we mean many users continuing to post articles on an SNS. Our results indicate that relatively large rewards compared to the cost of posting articles and comments are required to evolve cooperation-dominant situations, but optional responses with lower cost, such as “Like!” buttons, facilitate the evolution. This phenomenon is of interest because it is quite different from those shown in previous studies using meta-rewards games. We also confirmed the same phenomenon in an additional experiment using a network structure extracted from real-world SNS data.