Noise induced enhancement of network reciprocity in social dilemmas

TL;DR

This paper investigates how introducing noise into fitness measurement in social dilemma networks can enhance cooperation, challenging the assumption of perfect rationality and providing insights into more realistic social dynamics.

Contribution

It demonstrates that noise in fitness measurement significantly promotes cooperation in networked social dilemmas, a novel approach to understanding cooperation emergence.

Findings

Noise promotes cooperation in social dilemma networks.

Enhanced cooperation observed with increased noise levels.

Provides a new perspective on irrationality's role in social dynamics.

Abstract

The network reciprocity is an important dynamic rule fostering the emergence of cooperation among selfish individuals. This was reported firstly in the seminal work of Nowak and May, where individuals were arranged on the regular lattice network, and played the prisoner's dilemma game (PDG). In the standard PDG, one often assumes that the players have perfect rationality. However, in reality, we human are far from rational agents, as we often make mistakes, and behave irrationally. Accordingly, in this work, we introduce the element of noise into the measurement of fitness, which is determined by the parameter a controlling the degree of noise. The considered noise-induced mechanism remarkably promotes the behavior of cooperation, which may be conducive to interpret the emergence of cooperation within the population.