Contest Dynamics Between Cooperation and Exploitation
Alfonso de Miguel-Arribas, Chengbin Sun, Carlos Gracia-L\'azaro, Yamir Moreno

TL;DR
This paper extends the Prisoner's Dilemma to include competitive fighting using contest theory, revealing complex dynamics where cooperation can persist alongside competition in structured populations.
Contribution
It introduces a new model combining cooperation, defection, and fighting based on resource-dependent contest success, expanding understanding of social behavior evolution.
Findings
Cooperation and competition coexist under certain resource conditions.
Fighters delay defector dominance, promoting cooperation.
Rich phase diagrams show expanded cooperation regimes.
Abstract
Cooperation and competition are fundamental forces shaping both natural and human systems, yet their interplay remains poorly understood. The Prisoner's Dilemma Game (PDG) has long served as a foundational framework in Game Theory for studying cooperation and defection, yet it overlooks explicit competitive interactions. Contest Theory, in turn, provides tools to model competitive dynamics, where success depends on the investment of resources. In this work, we bridge these perspectives by extending the PDG to include a third strategy, fighting, governed by the Tullock contest success function, where success depends on relative resource investments. This model, implemented on a square lattice, examines the dynamics of cooperation, defection, and competition under resource accumulation and depletion scenarios. Our results reveal a rich phase diagram in which cooperative and competitive…
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Taxonomy
TopicsEvolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Mathematical and Theoretical Epidemiology and Ecology Models · Game Theory and Applications
