Disentangling Social and Group heterogeneities: Public Goods games on Complex Networks

Abstract: In this Letter we present a new perspective for the study of the Public Goods games on complex networks. The idea of our approach is to consider a realistic structure for the groups in which Public goods games are played. Instead of assuming that the social network of contacts self-defines a group structure with identical topological properties, we disentangle these two interaction patterns so to deal with systems having groups of definite sizes embedded in social networks with a tunable degree of heterogeneity. Surpisingly, this realistic framework, reveals that social heterogeneity may not foster cooperation depending on the game setting and the updating rule.