Evolution of cooperation and coordination via preferential detachment

Game theoretic models and computer simulations of the evolution of cooperation, coordination, culture, morality, and norms have played a significant role in the advancement of our understanding of how individual actions under differing incentive schemes produce different aggregated outcomes. This project presents preliminary results of extending existing research by demonstrating how a simple preferential detachment mechanism with learning (or population dynamics) on social networks can recreate the results of many previous models and produce compelling results on a much larger array of payoff structures. The ability to recreate the ¿good¿ outcomes using minimal assumptions and such a simple mechanism produces implications about sufficient mechanisms for the evolution of morality and insight into how to build the next generation of models for exploring these and other complex systems phenomena.