Evolution of Cooperation with Heterogeneous Conditional Cooperators
Open accessAbstract
Conditional cooperation declines over time if heterogeneous ideal conditional agents are involved in repeated interactions. With strict assumptions of rationality and a population consisting of ideal conditional agents who strictly follow a decision rule, cooperation is not expected. However, cooperation is commonly observed in human societies. Hence, we propose a novel evolutionary agent-based model where agents rely on social information. Each agent interacts only once either as a donor or as a receiver. In our model, the population consists of either non-ideal or ideal heterogeneous conditional agents. Their donation decisions are stochastically based on the comparison between the number of donations in the group and their conditional cooperative criterion value. Non-ideal agents occasionally cooperate even if the conditional rule of the agent is not satisfied. The stochastic decision and selection rules are controlled with decision intensity and selection intensity, respectively. The simulations show that high levels of cooperation (more than 90%) are established in the population with non-ideal agents for a particular range of parameter values. The emergence of cooperation needs non-ideal agents and a heterogeneous population. The current model differs from existing models by relying on social information and not on individual agent’s prior history of cooperation.
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Negative reciprocity can be switched to positive reciprocity given sufficient cooperation levels.
“Our novel alternative to punishment builds on the reciprocal nature of the trust—the fact that people reciprocate voluntary trust68—as well as the conditional nature of human cooperation—the fact that negative reciprocity can be switched to positive reciprocity given sufficient cooperation levels44,69–71.”
From Cooperation without punishment (2023) · cites this paper as [69]
The Introduction (page unavailable) describes agents switching from not donating to donating when enough others have cooperated. But it explicitly distinguishes this conditional response from retaliation or reciprocation toward other agents, so the source supports the switch in behavior, not its characterization as a switch from negative to positive reciprocity. (LLM, conf=0.87)
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- Authors
- Battu, B., Pammi, V. S. C., & Srinivasan, N.
- Affiliations
- University of Allahabad (IN)
- Corresponding author
- Battu, Balaraju
- Venue
- Scientific Reports
- Published
- 2018-03-14
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 4524-4524
- ISSN
- 2045-2322 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC5852119
- OpenAlex
- W2805528174
- Cited by
- 11
- References
- 57
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 3.98
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Scientific Reports (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Keywords
- evolution of cooperation, conditional cooperation, heterogeneous populations, social information, one-shot interactions, donation decisions, selection intensity
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