Evolution of cooperation in SNS-norms game on complex networks and real social networks

Social networking services (SNSs) such as Facebook and Google+ are indispensable social media for a variety of social communications, but we do not yet fully understand whether these currently popular social media will remain in the future. A number of studies have attempted to understand the mechanisms that keep social media thriving by using a meta-rewards game that is the dual form of a public goods game. 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 in which many users continuing to post articles. Our results indicate that relatively large rewards compared to the cost of posting articles and comments are required, but optional responses with lower cost, such as “Like!” buttons, play an important role in cooperation dominance. This phenomenon is of interest because it is quite different from those shown in previous studies using meta-rewards games.