Cooperators overcome migration dilemma through synchronization

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that synchronized cooperation in a population can overcome the migration dilemma in evolutionary game dynamics, especially when mild altruism incentivizes some groups to play a leadership game.

Contribution

It introduces a model using synchronized chaotic maps to show how cooperation can spread despite migration dilemmas in structured populations.

Findings

Synchronization enables cooperation to overcome migration barriers.

Mild altruism incentivizes leadership game play, promoting cooperation.

Cooperator fractions increase across the population through synchronization.

Abstract

Synchronization, cooperation, and chaos are ubiquitous phenomena in nature. In a population composed of many distinct groups of individuals playing the prisoner's dilemma game, there exists a migration dilemma: No cooperator would migrate to a group playing the prisoner's dilemma game lest it should be exploited by a defector; but unless the migration takes place, there is no chance of the entire population's cooperator-fraction to increase. Employing a randomly rewired coupled map lattice of chaotic replicator maps, modelling replication-selection evolutionary game dynamics, we demonstrate that the cooperators -- evolving in synchrony -- overcome the migration dilemma to proliferate across the population when altruism is mildly incentivized making few of the demes play the leader game.