Simulation of an Optional Strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma in Spatial and Non-spatial Environments
It addresses evolutionary game theory for modeling social dilemmas, but is incremental as it extends existing frameworks with an optional strategy.
This paper investigates how spatial and non-spatial environments affect outcomes in an extended Prisoner's Dilemma where agents can abstain, finding that cooperative clusters can emerge and persist under certain conditions.
This paper presents research comparing the effects of different environments on the outcome of an extended Prisoner's Dilemma, in which agents have the option to abstain from playing the game. We consider three different pure strategies: cooperation, defection and abstinence. We adopt an evolutionary game theoretic approach and consider two different environments: the first which imposes no spatial constraints and the second in which agents are placed on a lattice grid. We analyse the performance of the three strategies as we vary the loner's payoff in both structured and unstructured environments. Furthermore we also present the results of simulations which identify scenarios in which cooperative clusters of agents emerge and persist in both environments.