A Further Analysis of The Role of Heterogeneity in Coevolutionary Spatial Games

11/09/2017
by   Marcos Cardinot, et al.
0

Heterogeneity has been studied as one of the most common explanations of the puzzle of cooperation in social dilemmas. A large number of papers have been published discussing the effects of increasing heterogeneity in structured populations of agents, where it has been established that heterogeneity may favour cooperative behaviour if it supports agents to locally coordinate their strategies. In this paper, assuming an existing model of a heterogeneous weighted network, we aim to further this analysis by exploring the relationship (if any) between heterogeneity and cooperation. We adopt a weighted network which is fully populated by agents playing both the Prisoner's Dilemma or the Optional Prisoner's Dilemma games with coevolutionary rules, i.e., not only the strategies but also the link weights evolve over time. Surprisingly, results show that the heterogeneity of link weights (states) on their own does not always promote cooperation; rather cooperation is actually favoured by the increase in the number of overlapping states and not by the heterogeneity itself. We believe that these results can guide further research towards a more accurate analysis of the role of heterogeneity in social dilemmas.

READ FULL TEXT

page 4

page 5

research
02/05/2018

Local Wealth Redistribution Promotes Cooperation in Multiagent Systems

Designing mechanisms that leverage cooperation between agents has been a...
research
09/19/2016

The Optional Prisoner's Dilemma in a Spatial Environment: Coevolving Game Strategy and Link Weights

In this paper, the Optional Prisoner's Dilemma game in a spatial environ...
research
12/09/2022

A reversed form of public goods game: equivalence and difference

According to the public goods game (PGG) protocol, participants decide f...
research
04/28/2017

The Impact of Coevolution and Abstention on the Emergence of Cooperation

This paper explores the Coevolutionary Optional Prisoner's Dilemma (COPD...
research
02/06/2020

Social Diversity and Social Preferences in Mixed-Motive Reinforcement Learning

Recent research on reinforcement learning in pure-conflict and pure-comm...
research
11/20/2021

The downside of heterogeneity: How established relations counteract systemic adaptivity in tasks assignments

We study the lock-in effect in a network of task assignments. Agents hav...
research
08/17/2016

Simulation of an Optional Strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma in Spatial and Non-spatial Environments

This paper presents research comparing the effects of different environm...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset