Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Computers and Information - Department of Operations Research and Decision Support

Altruism has been a puzzling behavior studied by many scholars. Understanding the behavior is important to better predict decision making process outcomes, gain better insights into evolution and human nature. Work has been conducted to analyze altruism, how it is affected by reputation, empathic agents and spatial structure. The purpose of this thesis is to study altruism diffusion in social networks. The main contribution of the work is answering two questions, how social networks affect the diffusion of the altruistic behavior and how the structural characteristics of the network alters the diffusion pro- cess. Evolutionary game theory, particularly the ultimatum Game and complex networks analysis for a barabasi albert network form the foundations of this thesis. In the {uFB01}rst part of the work, a comparison between altruism di{u21B5}usion in a social network Vs. its diffusion in a well mixed population was conducted. A model simulating the Ultimatum game on a barabasi albert network was developed to understand how the diffusion differs between the two environments. The work demonstrated that starting from an entirely sel{uFB01}sh population, the structure of the social network limits the interactions between agents and thus limits the diffusion of the altruistic behavior

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