Cooperation dynamics on higher-order networks: A brief review

Abstract Higher-order interactions have attracted widespread attention in fields such as synchronization, epidemic spreading, and cascading failures, primarily due to their inherent ability to capture complex group interactions and structural dependencies that go beyond simple pairwise connections. In evolutionary game dynamics, more and more researchers are focusing on how higher-order interactions influence the evolution of collective cooperation. We review the impact of higher-order networks on the emergence of cooperation in various game scenarios, including public goods games, prisoner's dilemma games, and snowdrift games. Furthermore, we outline three promising directions for future research: how pairwise and higher-order interactions synergistically influence individual cooperative behavior; the evolution of cooperation on higher-order networks constructed from real interaction data, which is still largely unexplored; and the coevolutionary dynamics integrating evolutionary games with diverse dynamics ( e.g. , opinion, synchronization, epidemic spreading) on higher-order networks.