Oscillatory cooperation prevalence emerges from misperception

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that oscillatory cooperation behaviors naturally emerge in a prisoner's dilemma game when players have incomplete information and memory, revealing a mechanism driven by misperceived payoffs.

Contribution

It introduces a non-Markov model incorporating incomplete information and memory, showing how oscillations in cooperation levels arise from misperceptions of payoffs.

Findings

Oscillatory cooperation emerges with incomplete information and memory.

Longer memory and less information increase oscillation amplitude.

Robust across different population structures.

Abstract

Oscillatory behaviors are ubiquitous in nature and the human society. However, most previous works fail to reproduce them in the two-strategy game-theoretical models. Here we show that oscillatory behaviors naturally emerge if incomplete information is incorporated into the cooperation evolution of a non-Markov model. Specifically, we consider a population playing prisoner's dilemma game, where each individual can only probabilistically get access to their neighbors' payoff information and store them within their memory with a given length. They make their decisions based upon these memories. Interestingly, we find that the level of cooperation generally cannot stabilize but render quasi-periodic oscillation, and this observation is strengthened for a longer memory and a smaller information acquisition probability. The mechanism uncovered shows that there are misperceived payoffs about the player's neighborhood, facilitating the growth of cooperators and defectors at different stages that leads to oscillatory behaviors as a result. Our findings are robust to the underlying structure of the population. Given the omnipresence of incomplete information, our findings may provide a plausible explanation for the phenomenon of oscillatory behaviors in the real world.