Environmental feedback drives cooperation in spatial social dilemmas

TL;DR

This paper introduces a coevolutionary model where environmental feedback influences cooperation levels in spatial social dilemmas, showing that such feedback significantly enhances cooperation compared to traditional models.

Contribution

It presents a novel coevolutionary framework linking local cooperation to payoff values, demonstrating increased cooperation across different network topologies.

Findings

Higher cooperation levels observed with environmental feedback

Lonely defectors survive longer, delaying full cooperation

Environmental feedback extends the time to reach cooperation

Abstract

Exploiting others is beneficial individually but it could also be detrimental globally. The reverse is also true: a higher cooperation level may change the environment in a way that is beneficial for all competitors. To explore the possible consequence of this feedback we consider a coevolutionary model where the local cooperation level determines the payoff values of the applied prisoner's dilemma game. We observe that the coevolutionary rule provides a significantly higher cooperation level comparing to the traditional setup independently of the topology of the applied interaction graph. Interestingly, this cooperation supporting mechanism offers lonely defectors a high surviving chance for a long period hence the relaxation to the final cooperating state happens logarithmically slow. As a consequence, the extension of the traditional evolutionary game by considering interactions with the environment provides a good opportunity for cooperators, but their reward may arrive with some delay.