Iterated prisoner's dilemma in an asocial world dominated by loners, not by defectors

Optional interactions and suspicious behaviour facilitates trustful cooperation in prisoners dilemma

In evolutionary game theory interactions between individuals are often assumed obligatory. However, in many real-life situations, individuals can decide to opt out of an interaction depending on the information they have about the opponent. We consider a simple evolutionary game theoretic model to study such a scenario, where at each encounter between two individuals the type of the opponent (cooperator/defector) is known with some probability, and where each individual either accepts or opts out of the interaction. If the type of the opponent is unknown, a trustful individual accepts the interaction, whereas a suspicious individual opts out of the interaction. If either of the two individuals opt out both individuals remain without an interaction. We show that in the prisoners dilemma optional interactions along with suspicious behaviour facilitates the emergence of trustful cooperation.

Punishment in the form of shared cost promotes altruism in the cooperative dilemma games

One phenomenon or social institution often observed in multi-agent interactions is the altruistic punishment, i.e. the punishment of unfair behavior by others at a personal cost. Inspired by the works focusing on punishment and the intricate mechanism behind it, we theoretically study the strategy evolution in the framework of two-strategy game models with the punishment on defectors, moreover, the cost of punishing will be evenly shared among the cooperators. Theoretical computations suggest that larger punishment on defectors or smaller punishment cost incurred by cooperators will enhance the fixation of altruistic cooperation in the population. Through the replicate dynamics, the group size of the randomly selected individuals from the sufficiently large population will notably affect the strategy evolution in populations nested within a dilemma. By theoretical modeling the concept of shared cost for punishment from one point of view, our findings underscore the importance of punishment with shared cost as a factor in real-life decisions in an evolutionary game context.

The Evolution of Cooperation Through Institutional Incentives and Optional Participation

Rewards and penalties are common practical tools that can be used to promote cooperation in social institutions. The evolution of cooperation under reward and punishment incentives in joint enterprises has been formalized and investigated, mostly by using compulsory public good games. Recently, Sasaki et al. (2012, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109:1165-1169) considered optional participation as well as institutional incentives and described how the interplay between these mechanisms affects the evolution of cooperation in public good games. Here, we present a full classification of these cases of evolutionary dynamics. Specifically, whenever penalties are large enough to cause the bi-stability of both cooperation and defection in cases in which participation in the public good game is compulsory, these penalties will ultimately result in cooperation if participation in the public good game is optional. The global stability of coercion-based cooperation in this optional case contrasts strikingly with the bi-stability that is observed in the compulsory case. We also argue that optional participation is not as effective under rewards as under punishment.