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Playing against the fittest: a simple strategy that promotes the emergence of cooperation

Playing against the fittest: a simple strategy that promotes the emergence of cooperation
Playing against the fittest: a simple strategy that promotes the emergence of cooperation
Understanding the emergence and sustainability of cooperation is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology and is frequently studied in the framework of evolutionary game theory. A very powerful mechanism to promote cooperation is network reciprocity, where the interaction patterns and opportunities for strategy spread of agents are constrained to limited sets of permanent interactions partners. Cooperation survives because it is possible for closeknit communities of cooperation to be shielded from invasion by defectors. Here we show that parameter ranges in which cooperation can survive are strongly expanded if game play on networks is skewed towards more frequent interactions with more successful neighbours. In particular, if agents exclusively select neighbors for game play that are more successful than themselves, cooperation can even dominate in situations in which it would die out if interaction neighbours were chosen without a bias or with a preference for less successful opponents. We demonstrate that the “selecting fitter neighbours” strategy is evolutionarily stable. Moreover, it will emerge as the dominant strategy out of an initially random population of agents.
30003-[7pp]
Brede, M.
bbd03865-8e0b-4372-b9d7-cd549631f3f7
Brede, M.
bbd03865-8e0b-4372-b9d7-cd549631f3f7

Brede, M. (2011) Playing against the fittest: a simple strategy that promotes the emergence of cooperation. Europhysics Letters, 94 (3), 30003-[7pp]. (doi:10.1209/0295-5075/94/30003).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Understanding the emergence and sustainability of cooperation is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology and is frequently studied in the framework of evolutionary game theory. A very powerful mechanism to promote cooperation is network reciprocity, where the interaction patterns and opportunities for strategy spread of agents are constrained to limited sets of permanent interactions partners. Cooperation survives because it is possible for closeknit communities of cooperation to be shielded from invasion by defectors. Here we show that parameter ranges in which cooperation can survive are strongly expanded if game play on networks is skewed towards more frequent interactions with more successful neighbours. In particular, if agents exclusively select neighbors for game play that are more successful than themselves, cooperation can even dominate in situations in which it would die out if interaction neighbours were chosen without a bias or with a preference for less successful opponents. We demonstrate that the “selecting fitter neighbours” strategy is evolutionarily stable. Moreover, it will emerge as the dominant strategy out of an initially random population of agents.

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e-pub ahead of print date: 28 April 2011
Published date: May 2011
Organisations: Agents, Interactions & Complexity

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Local EPrints ID: 272859
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/272859
PURE UUID: 8edb9858-acde-4ab2-8bc1-b3fb6e3994a6

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Date deposited: 26 Sep 2011 16:23
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 10:11

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Author: M. Brede

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