Abstract
In social dilemmas, cooperation among randomly interacting individuals is often difficult to achieve. The situation changes if interactions take place in a network where the network structure jointly evolves with the behavioral strategies of the interacting individuals. In particular, cooperation can be stabilized if individuals tend to cut interaction links when facing adverse neighborhoods. Here we consider two different types of reaction to adverse neighborhoods, and all possible mixtures between these reactions. When faced with a gloomy outlook, players can either choose to cut and rewire some of their links to other individuals, or they can migrate to another location and establish new links in the new local neighborhood. We find that in general local rewiring is more favorable for the evolution of cooperation than emigration from adverse neighborhoods. Rewiring helps to maintain the diversity in the degree distribution of players and favors the spontaneous emergence of cooperative clusters. Both properties are known to favor the evolution of cooperation on networks. Interestingly, a mixture of migration and rewiring is even more favorable for the evolution of cooperation than rewiring on its own. While most models only consider a single type of reaction to adverse neighborhoods, the coexistence of several such reactions may actually be an optimal setting for the evolution of cooperation.
Highlights
Cooperation is a fascinating area of research since it touches upon so many different disciplines, ranging from biology to economics, sociology, and even theology [1]
In line with other studies, we have shown that in a network environment cooperation in social dilemmas does readily evolve if players have the opportunity to change their local interaction structure when surrounded by non-cooperative neighbors
The highest degree of cooperation evolved when the player population was polymorphic in the sense that both types of reaction to adverse neighborhoods were present in nonnegligible frequencies
Summary
Cooperation is a fascinating area of research since it touches upon so many different disciplines, ranging from biology to economics, sociology, and even theology [1]. The fact that in human societies cooperative behavior is common among unrelated people is puzzling from evolutionary point of view, since cooperation can be exploited by selfish strategies. Evolutionary game theory [2,3,4] provides a theoretical framework to address the subtleties of cooperation among selfish individuals. The prisoner’s dilemma [5,6] is a paradigm example for studying the emergence of cooperation in spite of the fact that selfinterest seems to dictate defective behavior. Past research has identified several key mechanisms (comprehensively reviewed in [7]) that promote the evolution of cooperation. Evolutionary games on graphs and networks are thoroughly reviewed in [21]. More recent studies have elaborated on various aspects, including the dynamical organization [22], clustering [23] and mixing patterns [24,25], as well as memory [26], robustness [27], phase transitions [28] and payoff normalization [29,30]
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