Parent-preferred dispersal promotes cooperation in structured populations

Area of Science:

• Evolutionary Game Theory
• Population Dynamics
• Social Behavior

Background:

• Dispersal is crucial for social and biological behaviors.
• The impact of dispersal on cooperation in structured populations remains understudied.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effects of two novel dispersal modes on the evolution of cooperation.
• To analyze strategy evolution in the prisoner's dilemma across diverse network structures.

Main Methods:

• Introduction of parent-preferred and offspring-preferred dispersal modes.
• Incorporation into the birth-death update rule and analysis on random-regular, small-world, and scale-free networks.
• Theoretical validation using pair-approximation and extension to other update rules (death-birth, imitation, pairwise comparison).

Main Results:

• Parent-preferred dispersal consistently favors cooperation.
• Offspring-preferred dispersal inhibits cooperation in homogeneous populations.
• On scale-free networks, intermediate offspring-preferred dispersal enhances cooperation, and coexistence of cooperators and defectors is observed at high strengths.

Conclusions:

• Preferential dispersal modes have robust and significant effects on the evolution of cooperation.
• These findings hold across various population structures and update rules, highlighting the importance of dispersal mechanisms.