Real-world social networks often contain not only one-to-one pairwise interactions, but also multi-person group interactions involving more than two individuals.

To reveal the important role of such group interactions (i.e., higher order topology) for the evolution of cooperation, we here use interdependent simplicial network topologies, where the evolutionary interactions, governed by the snowdrift game, are thus explored beyond pairwise links.

We also consider utility coupling between two network layers in an uncorrelated interdependence. Systematic Monte Carlo simulations lead us to two main conclusions.

First, we find that the level of cooperation can be elevated by increasing the utility coupling value. And second, cooperation tends to decline when we increase the number of 2-simplex interactions. However, despite the later result, the overall cooperation level on both interdependent networks is still higher than that on any isolated network.

We hope that these results will inspire future research on cooperation among unrelated individuals in higher order networks.

J. Wang, S. Guo, C. Xia, M. Perc, Utility coupling promotes cooperation in multiplayer snowdrift games on interdependent simplicial networks, Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Top. (2023) DOI: 10.1140/epjs/s11734-023-01003-3.