Mutual Trust and Cooperation in the Evolutionary Hawks-Doves Game

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dynamic network model showing that allowing individuals to reconfigure their social ties promotes widespread cooperation in the Hawks-Doves game, even under strategy perturbations, with implications for social interaction theories.

Contribution

It presents a novel dynamical network approach where tie-breaking fosters cooperation, challenging traditional views on persistent defection in large populations.

Findings

Cooperation becomes the norm with tie-breaking.

Cooperation remains stable despite strategy perturbations.

Emerging networks exhibit structures conducive to cooperation.

Abstract

Using a new dynamical network model of society in which pairwise interactions are weighted according to mutual satisfaction, we show that cooperation is the norm in the Hawks-Doves game when individuals are allowed to break ties with undesirable neighbors and to make new acquaintances in their extended neighborhood. Moreover, cooperation is robust with respect to rather strong strategy perturbations. We also discuss the empirical structure of the emerging networks, and the reasons that allow cooperators to thrive in the population. Given the metaphorical importance of this game for social interaction, this is an encouraging positive result as standard theory for large mixing populations prescribes that a certain fraction of defectors must always exist at equilibrium.