Exploring altruism in social networks

We show in this paper how altruistic behaviour emerges in social networks from an entirely selfish population. The analysis is conducted by simulating the ultimatum game on a Barabasi-Albert network with different degrees of preferential attachment. In previous work pair wise random matching was used in selecting players where all agents are connected, while in the proposed model interactions are limited to only connected agents on the graph. The analysis shows how a social networks structure limits the prevalence of the altruistic behaviour compared to previous work, and how a decrease in selection frequency will increase the chances of selfish agents to survive.