Emergence and suppression of cooperation by action visibility in transparent games.

Anton M Unakafov,Sebastian Moeller,Stephan Eule,Alexander Gail,Fred Wolf,Thomas Schultze,Igor Kagan,James O’Dwyer

doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007588

Abstract

Real-world agents, humans as well as animals, observe each other during interactions and choose their own actions taking the partners’ ongoing behaviour into account. Yet, classical game theory assumes that players act either strictly sequentially or strictly simultaneously without knowing each other’s current choices. To account for action visibility and provide a more realistic model of interactions under time constraints, we introduce a new game-theoretic setting called transparent games, where each player has a certain probability of observing the partner’s choice before deciding on its own action. By means of evolutionary simulations, we demonstrate that even a small probability of seeing the partner’s choice before one’s own decision substantially changes the evolutionary successful strategies. Action visibility enhances cooperation in an iterated coordination game, but reduces cooperation in a more competitive iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. In both games, “Win–stay, lose–shift” and “Tit-for-tat” strategies are predominant for moderate transparency, while a “Leader-Follower” strategy emerges for high transparency. Our results have implications for studies of human and animal social behaviour, especially for the analysis of dyadic and group interactions.

Highlights

One of the most interesting questions in evolutionary biology, social sciences, and economics is the emergence and maintenance of cooperation [1,2,3,4,5]
Classic game theory assumes that agents act either at the same time, without knowing each other’s choices, or one after another
We investigated the success of different behavioural strategies in the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (iPD) and i(A)CG games by using evolutionary simulations

Summary

Introduction

One of the most interesting questions in evolutionary biology, social sciences, and economics is the emergence and maintenance of cooperation [1,2,3,4,5]. A popular framework for studying cooperation (or the lack thereof) is game theory, which is frequently used to model interactions between “rational” decision-makers [6,7,8,9]. A model for repeated interactions is provided by iterated games with two commonly used settings [2]. In simultaneous games all players act at the same time and each player has to make a decision under uncertainty regarding the current choice of the partner(s). In sequential games players act one after another in a random or predefined order [10] and the player acting later in the sequence is guaranteed to see the choices of the preceding player(s). Maximal uncertainty only applies to the first player and—if there are more than two players—is reduced with every turn in the sequence

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Discussion

Conclusion