An Upstream-Reciprocity-Based Strategy for Academic Social Networks Using Public Goods Game

Academic social networks (ASNs) have attracted significant attention in recent years as researchers try to understand and improve how research is conducted. Several approaches have been investigated to identify, predict, and recommend scientific collaborators but few have considered to explore a strategy using the game theory. This article investigates the social phenomenon of upstream reciprocity (UR) using a game-theoretical framework. UR occurs when a person who has just received help, in turn, offers help to another. A suitable multiplayer game, the public goods game (PGG), is adopted to model scholarly interactions of coauthorship networks. Experiments are performed on real datasets in which cascades of UR scholars are identified. More importantly, the proposed UR strategy achieves better performance than non-UR scholars as they are found to have a higher publication and citation count. Furthermore, UR behavior is found to replicate throughout the network, which in turn increases the likelihood of others adopting it. Finally, theoretical proof and simulations suggest that UR has the potential to become an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS).