Does information of how good or bad your neighbors are enhance cooperation in spatial Prisoner's games?

Abstract

Network reciprocity is one of the key mechanisms to solve social dilemmas, and has attracted many researchers for the last decade. Here, we explore what happens if network reciprocity is dovetailed with indirect reciprocity. This is motivated by the idea that a player may utilize observed information to evaluate his neighbors. Simulations based on our minimal model reveal that adding indirect reciprocity does not always increase the level of cooperation beyond the level of model without indirect reciprocity. This implies that the combination of two different reciprocity mechanisms, each enhancing cooperation if applied independently, can lead negative interference effect on cooperation. The details of this depend on type of action assessment system determining what is good and bad. Interestingly, we found that a high level of information is not always superior to low levels of information.