Reciprocity-based cooperative phalanx maintained by overconfident players

TL;DR

This paper explores how overconfident and underconfident players influence cooperation in evolutionary game theory, revealing that both can significantly promote cooperation through biased strategy propagation.

Contribution

It introduces the role of confidence levels in strategy dynamics, showing that overconfidence enhances spatial reciprocity and cooperation in evolutionary games.

Findings

Overconfidence boosts spatial reciprocity mechanisms.

Underconfidence promotes local strategy coordination.

Both confidence biases increase overall cooperation levels.

Abstract

According to the evolutionary game theory principle, a strategy representing a higher payoff can spread among competitors. But there are cases when a player consistently overestimates or underestimates her own payoff, which undermines proper comparison. Interestingly, both underconfident and overconfident individuals are capable of elevating the cooperation level significantly. While former players stimulate a local coordination of strategies, the presence of overconfident individuals enhances the spatial reciprocity mechanism. In both cases the propagations of competing strategies are influenced in a biased way resulting in a cooperation supporting environment. These effects are strongly related to the nonlinear character of invasion probabilities which is a common and frequently observed feature of microscopic dynamics.