Effect of epidemic dynamics on evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game in scale-free networks

This paper studies the evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game (PDG) in finite dynamic scale-free networks, where the dynamic property is fulfilled by considering an epidemic process in networks. When a person is in infected state, he will not play PDG. Only healthy persons play PDG with their healthy neighbors. Our simulations show that (i) the ratio of healthy persons, R,, depends not only on the spreading rate A, but also on the recovery rate delta; (ii) The relationship between cooperation behaviors and the spreading rate lambda depends on the value of delta; (iii) Given the same value of R-s and payoff parameter b, the cooperation frequency f changes with delta; (iv) Some curves of f against R-s are monotonic while others are non-monotonic. We have qualitatively explained results (ii)-(iv) through competition mechanism of cooperation enhancement effect and cooperation suppression effect. Our work sheds some lights on the important effect of dynamic topology on evolutionary game.