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COOPERATION MAINTAINED BY FITNESS ADJUSTMENT.

Christine Taylor1, Janet Chen, Yoh Iwasa

  • 1Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Department of Mathematics, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.,

Evolutionary Ecology Research
|December 17, 2008
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Summary

Imposing costs on high-performing players can enhance cooperation in evolutionary games. This "envy-based" fitness adjustment, even with mutation, promotes intermediate cooperation levels.

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Area of Science:

  • Evolutionary Game Theory
  • Behavioral Economics
  • Mathematical Biology

Background:

  • Cooperation is crucial for social structures but faces challenges from self-interest.
  • Understanding mechanisms that sustain cooperation is a key question in social and biological sciences.
  • Previous models often explore direct reciprocity or punishment, but fitness-based adjustments are less explored.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if imposing costs on high-performing individuals can enhance cooperation levels.
  • To analyze the evolutionary stability of cooperation under a novel fitness adjustment mechanism.

Main Methods:

  • Mathematical modeling using replicator dynamics with mutation.
  • Analysis of the Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) distribution for cooperation levels.
  • Simulations based on a cooperative dilemma game with a specific cost-imposition rule.

Main Results:

  • Without mutation, the population converges to a single cooperation level determined by initial conditions.
  • With mutation, an equilibrium distribution of cooperation emerges, peaking at intermediate levels.
  • Fitness adjustments based on relative performance (akin to 'envy') effectively maintain cooperation.

Conclusions:

  • Imposing costs on players exceeding the mean performance can be an effective strategy for promoting cooperation.
  • The 'envy-driven' fitness adjustment mechanism demonstrates robustness in maintaining cooperation, even with population heterogeneity (mutation).
  • This finding has implications for institutional design, suggesting that policies or social norms that adjust fitness based on relative success can foster cooperative behaviors.