Clustering Drives Cooperation on Reputation Networks, All Else Fixed

Abstract: Reputation-based cooperation on social networks offers a causal mechanism between graph properties and social trust. Recent papers on the structural microfoundations of the society used this insight to show how demographic processes, such as falling fertility, urbanisation, and migration, can alter the logic of human societies. This paper demonstrates the underlying mechanism in a way that is accessible to scientists not specialising in networks. Additionally, the paper shows that, when the size and degree of the network is fixed (i.e., all graphs have the same number of agents, who all have the same number of connections), it is the clustering coefficient that drives differences in how cooperative social networks are.