Fusing enacted and expected mimicry generates a winning strategy that promotes the evolution of cooperation.

ABSTRACT: Although cooperation and trust are essential features for the development of prosperous populations, they also put cooperating individuals at risk for exploitation and abuse. Empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that the solution to the problem resides in the practice of mimicry and imitation, the expectation of opponent's mimicry and the reliance on similarity indices. Here we fuse the principles of enacted and expected mimicry and condition their application on two similarity indices to produce a model of mimicry and relative similarity. Testing the model in computer simulations of behavioral niches, populated with agents that enact various strategies and learning algorithms, shows how mimicry and relative similarity outperforms all the opponent strategies it was tested against, p

SUBMITTER: Fischer I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3690892 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature