Effects of mobility in a population of Prisoner's Dilemma players

TL;DR

This paper investigates how individual mobility affects cooperation in a population playing the Prisoner's Dilemma, revealing conditions under which cooperation persists and dominates.

Contribution

It introduces a model of moving Prisoner's Dilemma players and identifies parameters that promote stable cooperation, a novel approach in spatial game dynamics.

Findings

Cooperation survives when temptation and velocity are low.

Under certain conditions, all players become cooperators.

Mobility influences the stability of cooperative states.

Abstract

We address the problem of how the survival of cooperation in a social system depends on the motion of the individuals. Specifically, we study a model in which Prisoner's Dilemma players are allowed to move in a two-dimensional plane. Our results show that cooperation can survive in such a system provided that both the temptation to defect and the velocity at which agents move are not too high. Moreover, we show that when these conditions are fulfilled, the only asymptotic state of the system is that in which all players are cooperators. Our results might have implications for the design of cooperative strategies in motion coordination and other applications including wireless networks.