The good, the bad, the well-connected

Abstract

In this paper, we analyse a variation of truel competitions in which each prospective player is represented by a node in a scale-free network. Without including any particular spatial arrangement of players, traditional game theory suggests that in many truel settings the strongest player often has the lowest probability of survival, a paradox that has been popularised by the term survival of the unfittest. However, both our single-run and the Monte-Carlo simulations suggest that this particular notion does not hold in scale-free networks. The spatial structure and arrangement of players are crucial for the outcome of truels, as in scale-free networks the number of players surviving the competition positively depends on their marksmanship (i.e., the strongest players indeed have the highest probability of survival).