When agreement-accepting free-riders are a necessary evil for the evolution of cooperation.

ABSTRACT: Agreements and commitments have provided a novel mechanism to promote cooperation in social dilemmas in both one-shot and repeated games. Individuals requesting others to commit to cooperate (proposers) incur a cost, while their co-players are not necessarily required to pay any, allowing them to free-ride on the proposal investment cost (acceptors). Although there is a clear complementarity in these behaviours, no dynamic evidence is currently available that proves that they coexist in different forms of commitment creation. Using a stochastic evolutionary model allowing for mixed population states, we identify non-trivial roles of acceptors as well as the importance of intention recognition in commitments. In the one-shot prisoner's dilemma, alliances between proposers and acceptors are

SUBMITTER: Martinez-Vaquero LA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5449399 | biostudies-literature | 2017 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature