Coevolution of Mercy and Altruistic Cooperation

TL;DR

This paper explores how mercy, modeled as sharing resources with poorer neighbors, can promote altruistic cooperation among agents, expanding understanding beyond punishment and group selection in evolutionary game theory.

Contribution

It introduces a computational model demonstrating that mercy can evolve and foster altruistic cooperation in agent networks, a novel perspective in evolutionary game theory.

Findings

Mercy leads to increased altruistic cooperation in simulations

Sharing resources with poorer neighbors stabilizes cooperative behavior

Mercy can evolve alongside other social behaviors in networked agents

Abstract

Besides altruistic punishment and group selection, we argue that, mercy can lead to altruistic cooperation. Modeling the micro economic behavior of the mercy, with two alleles of genes (Cooperation or Defection & Mercy or No mercy) agents in a network, we present the computational simulation results in the spatiotemporal evolution game theory frame to prove the above argument. Here, mercy (or as 'Love thy neighbors') means, the agents, with mercy preference, might share his own fitness with his poorest neighbor who poorer than himself.