文章基本信息

标题：Cost-effective external interference for promoting the evolution of cooperation
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作者：The Anh Han ; Long Tran-Thanh
期刊名称：Scientific Reports
电子版ISSN：2045-2322
出版年度：2018
卷号：8
期号：1
页码：15997
DOI：10.1038/s41598-018-34435-2
语种：English
出版社：Springer Nature
摘要：The problem of promoting the evolution of cooperative behaviour within populations of self-regarding individuals has been intensively investigated across diverse fields of behavioural, social and computational sciences. In most studies, cooperation is assumed to emerge from the combined actions of participating individuals within the populations, without taking into account the possibility of external interference and how it can be performed in a cost-efficient way. Here, we bridge this gap by studying a cost-efficient interference model based on evolutionary game theory, where an exogenous decision-maker aims to ensure high levels of cooperation from a population of individuals playing the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma, at a minimal cost. We derive analytical conditions for which an interference scheme or strategy can guarantee a given level of cooperation while at the same time minimising the total cost of investment (for rewarding cooperative behaviours), and show that the results are highly sensitive to the intensity of selection by interference. Interestingly, we show that a simple class of interference that makes investment decisions based on the population composition can lead to significantly more cost-efficient outcomes than standard institutional incentive strategies, especially in the case of weak selection.