Perception without Self-Matching in Conditional Tag Based Cooperation

TL;DR

This paper models how cooperation evolves in populations with distinguishable tags, showing that perception without self-matching enhances cooperation, especially with higher diversity and lower costs, and that perception can evolve over time.

Contribution

It introduces a model where individuals do not compare their own tags to others, revealing how perception and diversity influence cooperation evolution.

Findings

Higher cooperation rates with perfect perception and more tags.

Perception evolves from partial to perfect depending on reproduction mechanisms.

Perception levels decrease as the cost of cooperation increases.

Abstract

We consider a model for the evolution of cooperation in a population where individuals may have one of a number of different heritable and distinguishable markers or tags. Individuals interact with each of their neighbours on a square lattice by either cooperating by donating some benefit at a cost to themselves or defecting by doing nothing. The decision to cooperate or defect is contingent on each individual's perception of its interacting partner's tag. Unlike in other tag-based models individuals do not compare their own tag to that of their interaction partner. That is, there is no {\em self-matching}. When perception is perfect the cooperation rate is substantially higher than in the usual spatial prisoner's dilemma game when the cost of cooperation is high. The enhancement in cooperation is positively correlated with the number of different tags. The more diverse a population is the more cooperative it becomes. When individuals start with an inability to perceive tags the population evolves to a state where individuals gain at least partial perception. With some reproduction mechanisms perfect perception evolves, but with others the ability to perceive tags is imperfect. We find that perception of tags evolves to lower levels when the cost of cooperation is higher.