Promoting cooperation in social dilemmas via simple coevolutionary rules

TL;DR

This paper investigates how simple coevolutionary rules that modify players' teaching activity based on strategy success can promote cooperation in social dilemmas, revealing that promoting defectors can be more beneficial than promoting cooperators.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes coevolutionary rules affecting teaching activity based on strategy success, showing their impact on cooperation across different social dilemma models.

Findings

Both coevolutionary rules promote cooperation regardless of the game.

Promoting defectors' dissemination is more beneficial for cooperation than promoting cooperators.

Player heterogeneity and influential individuals determine the final outcome.

Abstract

We study the evolution of cooperation in structured populations within popular models of social dilemmas, whereby simple coevolutionary rules are introduced that may enhance players abilities to enforce their strategy on the opponent. Coevolution thus here refers to an evolutionary process affecting the teaching activity of players that accompanies the evolution of their strategies. Particularly, we increase the teaching activity of a player after it has successfully reproduced, yet we do so depending on the disseminated strategy. We separately consider coevolution affecting either only the cooperators or only the defectors, and show that both options promote cooperation irrespective of the applied game. Opposite to intuitive reasoning, however, we reveal that the coevolutionary promotion of players spreading defection is, in the long run, more beneficial for cooperation than the likewise promotion of cooperators. We explain the contradictory impact of the two considered coevolutionary rules by examining the differences between resulting heterogeneities that segregate participating players, and furthermore, demonstrate that the influential individuals completely determine the final outcome of the games. Our findings are immune to changes defining the type of considered social dilemmas and highlight that the heterogeneity of players, resulting in a positive feedback mechanism, is a fundamental property promoting cooperation in groups of selfish individuals.