Random mobility and spatial structure often enhance cooperation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how random mobility and spatial structure influence cooperation in various social dilemma games, revealing that mobility can enhance cooperation by mitigating spatial structure effects.

Contribution

It demonstrates that random mobility and dilution can promote cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma, Snowdrift, and Stag Hunt games, offering new insights into spatial game dynamics.

Findings

Mobility suppresses inhibiting effects of spatial structure in Snowdrift game.

Mobility enhances cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma and Stag Hunt games.

Spatial structure alone can both promote and inhibit cooperation depending on the context.

Abstract

The effects of an unconditional move rule in the spatial Prisoner's Dilemma, Snowdrift and Stag Hunt games are studied. Spatial structure by itself is known to modify the outcome of many games when compared with a randomly mixed population, sometimes promoting, sometimes inhibiting cooperation. Here we show that random dilution and mobility may suppress the inhibiting factors of the spatial structure in the Snowdrift game, while enhancing the already larger cooperation found in the Prisoner's dilemma and Stag Hunt games.