The Optional Prisoner's Dilemma in a Spatial Environment: Coevolving Game Strategy and Link Weights
This work provides insights into cooperative behavior in real-world systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing game theory models with coevolutionary rules.
The paper tackled the problem of cooperation emergence in the Optional Prisoner's Dilemma in a spatial environment by coevolving game strategy and link weights, finding that abstainers protect cooperators from defectors and observing scenarios of cyclic competition and full cooperation dominance.
In this paper, the Optional Prisoner's Dilemma game in a spatial environment, with coevolutionary rules for both the strategy and network links between agents, is studied. Using a Monte Carlo simulation approach, a number of experiments are performed to identify favourable configurations of the environment for the emergence of cooperation in adverse scenarios. Results show that abstainers play a key role in the protection of cooperators against exploitation from defectors. Scenarios of cyclic competition and of full dominance of cooperation are also observed. This work provides insights towards gaining an in-depth understanding of the emergence of cooperative behaviour in real-world systems.