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Emergence and suppression of cooperation by action visibility in transparent games.

ABSTRACT: Real-world agents, humans as well as animals, observe each other during interactions and choose their own actions taking the partners' ongoing behaviour into account. Yet, classical game theory assumes that players act either strictly sequentially or strictly simultaneously without knowing each other's current choices. To account for action visibility and provide a more realistic model of interactions under time constraints, we introduce a new game-theoretic setting called transparent games, where each player has a certain probability of observing the partner's choice before deciding on its own action. By means of evolutionary simulations, we demonstrate that even a small probability of seeing the partner's choice before one's own decision substantially changes the evolutionary successful strategies. Action visibility enhances cooperation in an iterated coordination game, but reduces cooperation in a more competitive iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. In both games, "Win-stay, lose-shift" and "Tit-for-tat" strategies are predominant for moderate transparency, while a "Leader-Follower" strategy emerges for high transparency. Our results have implications for studies of human and animal social behaviour, especially for the analysis of dyadic and group interactions.

SUBMITTER: Unakafov AM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6975562 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Emergence and suppression of cooperation by action visibility in transparent games.

Unakafov Anton M AM Schultze Thomas T Gail Alexander A Moeller Sebastian S Kagan Igor I Eule Stephan S Wolf Fred F

PLoS computational biology 20200109 1

Real-world agents, humans as well as animals, observe each other during interactions and choose their own actions taking the partners' ongoing behaviour into account. Yet, classical game theory assumes that players act either strictly sequentially or strictly simultaneously without knowing each other's current choices. To account for action visibility and provide a more realistic model of interactions under time constraints, we introduce a new game-theoretic setting called transparent games, whe ...[more]

PMID: 31917809

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Project description:This paper investigates cooperation games in which poor agents do not benefit from cooperation with wealthy agents. They instead benefit from considering wealth relative to decision payoffs of fitness or wealth. Of concern is the effect of cooperation on participants, their rational self-interest and choices, and not the evolution of cooperation directly. The accumulation of fitness or wealth has been shown in the literature to lead to different optimal strategies for wealthy and poor players in Chicken games. The effect could have important explanatory power if it were more broadly applicable. First we empirically compare two published results, one involving the temptation parameter vs. degree of cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma, and the other a surprising result from a public goods game with participants from different cultures, networks and wealth in which a fixed rather than relative payoff scheme was used. Using the temptation data to calibrate the public goods behavior suggests wealth factors can provide an explanation for the results. Second we show using simulation that adding a survival threshold to a wealth or fitness accumulating Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma produces a wealth relative effect. We clarify previous results to show the poor must avoid survival risk, regardless of whether this is associated with cooperation or defection. We do this by introducing the Farmer's Game, a simulation of Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with wealth accumulation and a survival threshold. This is used to evaluate the Tit-for-Tat strategy and four variants. Equilibrium payoffs keep the game scaled to social relevance, with a fraction of all payoffs externalized as a turn cost parameter. Findings include poor performance of Tit-for-Tat near the survival threshold, superior performance of low risk strategies for both poor and wealthy players, dependence of survival of the poor near the threshold on Tit-for-Tat forgiveness, unexpected optimization of forgiveness without encountering a social dilemma, improved performance of a diverse mix of strategies, and a more abrupt threshold of social catastrophe for the better performing mix. Lastly we compare cooperating and non-cooperating societies using the simulation and discover disturbing connections between cooperation and familiar non-egalitarian wealth distribution patterns.

Dataset Information

Emergence and suppression of cooperation by action visibility in transparent games.

Publications

Emergence and suppression of cooperation by action visibility in transparent games.

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