scholarly journals EVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY DYNAMICS FOR TAG-BASED COOPERATION AND DEFECTION IN THE SPATIAL AND ASPATIAL SNOWDRIFT GAME

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (11) ◽  
pp. 1230039 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT A. LAIRD

Cooperation is a costly behavior undertaken by one individual which benefits another individual. Since cooperators are easily exploited by defectors (those who receive the benefits of cooperation but do not cooperate themselves), the evolution and maintenance of cooperation rely on mechanisms that allow cooperators to interact with one another more frequently than would be predicted based on their relative abundance in a population. One simple mechanism is based on the recognition of "tags" — arbitrary, yet identifiable phenotypic traits. Tags allow for the existence of conditionally cooperative strategies; e.g. individuals could adopt a strategy whereby they cooperate with tag-mates but defect against non-tag-mates. Previous research has considered the tag and strategy dynamics of unconditional and conditional strategies engaged in the Prisoner's Dilemma game, the paradigmatic framework for studying the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation, in which defection against a cooperator yields the greatest fitness payoff, followed by mutual cooperation, mutual defection, and cooperation with a defector. Here, using complementary spatial and aspatial lattice models, an alternative payoff structure is considered, based on the Snowdrift game, in which the rankings of the payoffs associated with mutual defection and cooperation with a defector are reversed relative to the Prisoner's Dilemma. In the absence of mutation, it is demonstrated that the aspatial two-tag game tends to collapse into the traditional, non-tag-based Snowdrift game, with the frequency of cooperators and defectors predicted precisely by evolutionary dynamics analysis. The spatial two-tag game, on the other hand, produces a richer variety of outcomes, whose occurrence depends on the cost-benefit ratio of mutual cooperation; these outcomes include the dominance of conditional cooperators, the dominance of unconditional defectors, and the cyclic (or noncyclic) coexistence of the two. These outcomes are then shown to be modified by mutation (which softens the transition boundaries between outcomes), and by the presence of more than two tags (which promotes nepotistic conditional cooperation).

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (94) ◽  
pp. 20131186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulio Cimini ◽  
Angel Sánchez

Cooperative behaviour lies at the very basis of human societies, yet its evolutionary origin remains a key unsolved puzzle. Whereas reciprocity or conditional cooperation is one of the most prominent mechanisms proposed to explain the emergence of cooperation in social dilemmas, recent experimental findings on networked Prisoner's Dilemma games suggest that conditional cooperation also depends on the previous action of the player—namely on the ‘mood’ in which the player is currently in. Roughly, a majority of people behave as conditional cooperators if they cooperated in the past, whereas they ignore the context and free ride with high probability if they did not. However, the ultimate origin of this behaviour represents a conundrum itself. Here, we aim specifically to provide an evolutionary explanation of moody conditional cooperation (MCC). To this end, we perform an extensive analysis of different evolutionary dynamics for players' behavioural traits—ranging from standard processes used in game theory based on pay-off comparison to others that include non-economic or social factors. Our results show that only a dynamic built upon reinforcement learning is able to give rise to evolutionarily stable MCC, and at the end to reproduce the human behaviours observed in the experiments.


2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (9) ◽  
pp. 2882-2910 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yves Breitmoser

In the repeated prisoner's dilemma, predictions are notoriously difficult. Recently, however, Blonski, Ockenfels, and Spagnolo (2011)—henceforth, BOS—showed that experimental subjects predictably cooperate when the discount factor exceeds a particular threshold. I analyze individual strategies in four recent experiments to examine whether strategies are predictable, too. Behavior is well summarized by “Semi-Grim” strategies: cooperate after mutual cooperation, defect after mutual defection, randomize otherwise. This holds both in aggregate and individually, and it explains the BOS-threshold: Semi-Grim equilibria appear as the discount factor crosses this threshold, and then, subjects start cooperating in round 1 and switch to Semi-Grim in continuation play. (JEL C72, C73, C92, D12)


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Seyhun Saral

Conditional cooperation has been a common explanation for the observed cooperation, and its decline in social dilemma experiments. Numerous studies showed that most of the experimental subjects can be categorized into three types: conditional cooperators, self-maximizers and hump-shaped (triangle) cooperators. In this study, I investigate conditional strategy types and their role on the emergence of cooperation and their evolutionary success. For this purpose, I use an extension of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Game. The agents are characterized by their initial move and their conditional responses to each level of cooperation. By using simulations, I estimate the likelihood of cooperation for different probability of continuations.I show that, when the continuation probability is sufficiently large, high levels cooperation is achieved. In this case, the most successful strategies are those who employ an all-or-none type of conditional cooperation, followed by perfect conditional cooperators. In intermediate levels of continuation probabilities, however, hump-shaped contributor types are the ones that are most likely to thrive, followed by imperfect conditional cooperators. Those agents cooperate in a medium level of cooperation within themselves and each other. The results explain the existence of hump-shaped type of cooperators with a purely payoff-based reasoning, as opposed to previous attempts to explain this strategy with psychological mechanisms.


2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (23n24) ◽  
pp. 4035-4040 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. HUI ◽  
CHEN XU ◽  
DA-FANG ZHENG

We study the effects of networking on the extent of cooperation emerging in an evolutionary snowdrift game, which is a possible alternative to the well-known Prisoner's Dilemma game. The model is studied in the Newman-Watts network that spans the regular, small-world, and random networks through randomly added links. For a wide range of payoffs, the added links are found to suppress cooperation, when compared with a well-mixed or fully connected system. We identify extinction payoffs that characterize the emergence of a homogeneous steady state and study how these payoffs depend on the extent of addition of links to the network.


2012 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 337-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Friedman ◽  
Ryan Oprea

We study prisoners' dilemmas played in continuous time with flow payoffs accumulated over 60 seconds. In most cases, the median rate of mutual cooperation is about 90 percent. Control sessions with repeated matchings over eight subperiods achieve less than half as much cooperation, and cooperation rates approach zero in one-shot sessions. In follow-up sessions with a variable number of subperiods, cooperation rates increase nearly linearly as the grid size decreases, and, with one-second subperiods, they approach continuous levels. Our data support a strand of theory that explains how capacity to respond rapidly stabilizes cooperation and destabilizes defection in the prisoner's dilemma. (JEL C72, C78, C91)


1987 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Bendor ◽  
Dilip Mookherjee

Work by Axelrod, Hardin, and Taylor indicates that problems of repeated collective action may lessen if people use decentralized strategies of reciprocity to induce mutual cooperation. Hobbes's centralized solution may thus be overrated. We investigate these issues by representing ongoing collective action as an n-person repeated prisoner's dilemma. The results show that decentralized conditional cooperation can ease iterated collective action dilemmas—if all players perfectly monitor the relation between individual choices and group payoffs. Once monitoring uncertainty is introduced, such strategies degrade rapidly in value, and centrally administered selective incentives become relatively more valuable. Most importantly, we build on a suggestion of Herbert Simon by showing that a hierarchical structure, with reciprocity used in subunits and selective incentives centrally administered, combines the advantages of the decentralized and centralized solutions. This hierarchical form is more stable than the decentralized structure and often secures more cooperation than the centralized structure. Generally, the model shows that the logic of repeated decision making has significant implications for the institutional forms of collective action.


2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (03) ◽  
pp. 377-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
TETSUSHI OHDAIRA ◽  
TAKAO TERANO

The condition of cooperation in social conflicts of interest has been an interesting topic. On the one hand people usually desire to make their own profit. On the other hand, they mutually cooperate. This fact has motivated many researchers. Some solutions for this question have been proposed, and particular studies indicate that the diversity in decision-making or relationships promotes cooperation. In this research, we achieve the diversity by utilizing the novel method that refers to the mechanism of correction regarding each probability that every strategy comes to the representative by decision-making of group. This mechanism works when difference between the probability of the first and others becomes quite large. If once every group adopts this corrected decision, he/she achieves mutual cooperation of high level in the sequential prisoner's dilemma game in case the number of strategies (= players) is within the definite range. We also note that this game can effectively describe the property of evolution of strategy only with a small number of players. When each group has many players, in contrast to previous research, the decision with correction also has an effect on the suppression of prevalence of defection. In addition, we also show that the decision of this model is analogous to the system of redistribution of revenue, which provides balance of strength between several teams in professional sports.


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