The Impact of Coevolution and Abstention on the Emergence of Cooperation
This addresses the fundamental problem of cooperation in evolutionary game theory, with incremental insights into coevolution and abstention effects.
The paper tackles the problem of how cooperation emerges in populations by studying the Coevolutionary Optional Prisoner's Dilemma game, finding that coevolutionary rules enable cooperators to survive and dominate, with abstainers playing a key protective role.
This paper explores the Coevolutionary Optional Prisoner's Dilemma (COPD) game, which is a simple model to coevolve game strategy and link weights of agents playing the Optional Prisoner's Dilemma game. We consider a population of agents placed in a lattice grid with boundary conditions. A number of Monte Carlo simulations are performed to investigate the impacts of the COPD game on the emergence of cooperation. Results show that the coevolutionary rules enable cooperators to survive and even dominate, with the presence of abstainers in the population playing a key role in the protection of cooperators against exploitation from defectors. We observe that in adverse conditions such as when the initial population of abstainers is too scarce/abundant, or when the temptation to defect is very high, cooperation has no chance of emerging. However, when the simple coevolutionary rules are applied, cooperators flourish.