Cooperation with potential leaders in evolutionary game study of networking agents

Increasingly influential leadership is significant to the cooperation and success of human societies. However, whether and how leaders emerge among evolutionary game players still remain less understood. Here, we study the evolution of potential leaders in the framework of evolutionary game theory, adopting the prisoner´s dilemma and snowdrift game as metaphors of cooperation between unrelated individuals. We find that potential leaders can spontaneously emerge from homogeneous populations along with the evolution of cooperation, demonstrated by the result that a minority of agents spread their strategies more successfully than others and guide the population behavior, irrespective of the applied games. In addition, the phenomenon just described can be observed more notably in populations situated on scale free networks, and thus implies the relevance of heterogeneous networks for the possible emergence of leadership in the proposed system. Our results underscore the importance of the study of leadership in the population indulging in evolutionary games.