Temporal assortment of cooperators in the spatial prisoner's dilemma

11/29/2020

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by   Tim Johnson, et al.

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We study a spatial, one-shot prisoner's dilemma (PD) model in which selection operates on both an organism's behavioral strategy (cooperate or defect) and its choice of when to implement that strategy across a set of discrete time slots. Cooperators evolve to fixation regularly in the model when we add time slots to lattices and small-world networks, and their portion of the population grows, albeit slowly, when organisms interact in a scale-free network. This selection for cooperators occurs across a wide variety of time slots and it does so even when a crucial condition for the evolution of cooperation on graphs is violated–namely, when the ratio of benefits to costs in the PD does not exceed the number of spatially-adjacent organisms.