The Impact of Irrational Behaviours in the Optional Prisoner's Dilemma with Game-Environment Feedback

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel framework for the optional prisoner's dilemma incorporating irrational behaviors via prospect theory, analyzes stability and oscillations, and compares dynamics under different evolutionary models.

Contribution

It extends existing models by integrating prospect theory into OPD with game-environment feedback and compares replicator and pairwise comparison dynamics.

Findings

Stability analysis of equilibria reveals conditions for oscillations.

Prospect theory influences the dynamics and outcomes of the game.

Differences between replicator and pairwise comparison models are highlighted.

Abstract

In the optional prisoner's dilemma (OPD), players can choose to cooperate and defect as usual, but can also abstain as a third possible strategy. This strategy models the players' participation in the game and is a relevant aspect in many settings, e.g. social networks or opinion dynamics where abstention is an option during an election. In this paper, we provide a formulation of the OPD where we consider irrational behaviours in the population inspired by prospect theory. Prospect theory has gained increasing popularity in recent times thanks to its ability to capture aspects such as reference dependence or loss aversion which are common in human behaviour. This element is original in our formulation of the game and is incorporated in our framework through pairwise comparison dynamics. Recently, the impact of the environment has been studied in the form of feedback on the population dynamics. Another element of novelty in our work is the extension of the game-environment feedback to the OPD in two forms of dynamics, the replicator and the pairwise comparison. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we propose a modelling framework where prospect theory is used to capture irrational behaviours in an evolutionary game with game-environment feedback. Second, we carry out the stability analysis of the system equilibria and discuss the oscillating behaviours arising from the game-environment feedback. Finally, we extend our previous results to the OPD and we discuss the main differences between the model resulting from the replicator dynamics and the one resulting from the pairwise comparison dynamics.