Inequality as information: Wealth homophily facilitates the evolution of cooperation

Abstract Free-riding produces inequality in the prisoners’ dilemma: cooperators suffer costs that defectors avoid, thus putting them at a material disadvantage to their anti-social peers. This inequality, accordingly, conveys information about a social partner’s choices in past game play and raises...

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Autores principales:	Tim Johnson, Oleg Smirnov
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	Nature Portfolio 2018
Materias:	Medicine R Science Q
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/110b301bf25d452f8ef964dd965c0a8e
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:110b301bf25d452f8ef964dd965c0a8e2021-12-02T15:08:27ZInequality as information: Wealth homophily facilitates the evolution of cooperation10.1038/s41598-018-30052-12045-2322https://doaj.org/article/110b301bf25d452f8ef964dd965c0a8e2018-08-01T00:00:00Zhttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-30052-1https://doaj.org/toc/2045-2322Abstract Free-riding produces inequality in the prisoners’ dilemma: cooperators suffer costs that defectors avoid, thus putting them at a material disadvantage to their anti-social peers. This inequality, accordingly, conveys information about a social partner’s choices in past game play and raises the possibility that agents can use the aggregation of past payoffs—i.e. wealth—to identify a social partner who uses their same strategy. Building on these insights, we study a computational model in which agents can employ a strategy—when playing multiple one-shot prisoners’ dilemma games per generation—in which they view other agents’ summed payoffs from previous games, choose to enter a PD game with the agent whose summed payoffs most-closely approximate their own, and then always cooperate. Here we show that this strategy of wealth homophily—labelled COEQUALS (“CO-operate with EQUALS”)—can both invade an incumbent population of defectors and resist invasion. The strategy succeeds because wealth homophily leads agents to direct cooperation disproportionately toward others of their own type—a phenomenon known as “positive assortment”. These findings illuminate empirical evidence indicating that viewable inequality degrades cooperation and they show how a standard feature of evolutionary game models—viz. the aggregation of payoffs during a generation—can double as an information mechanism that facilitates positive assortment.Tim JohnsonOleg SmirnovNature PortfolioarticleMedicineRScienceQENScientific Reports, Vol 8, Iss 1, Pp 1-10 (2018)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	Medicine R Science Q
spellingShingle	Medicine R Science Q Tim Johnson Oleg Smirnov Inequality as information: Wealth homophily facilitates the evolution of cooperation
description	Abstract Free-riding produces inequality in the prisoners’ dilemma: cooperators suffer costs that defectors avoid, thus putting them at a material disadvantage to their anti-social peers. This inequality, accordingly, conveys information about a social partner’s choices in past game play and raises the possibility that agents can use the aggregation of past payoffs—i.e. wealth—to identify a social partner who uses their same strategy. Building on these insights, we study a computational model in which agents can employ a strategy—when playing multiple one-shot prisoners’ dilemma games per generation—in which they view other agents’ summed payoffs from previous games, choose to enter a PD game with the agent whose summed payoffs most-closely approximate their own, and then always cooperate. Here we show that this strategy of wealth homophily—labelled COEQUALS (“CO-operate with EQUALS”)—can both invade an incumbent population of defectors and resist invasion. The strategy succeeds because wealth homophily leads agents to direct cooperation disproportionately toward others of their own type—a phenomenon known as “positive assortment”. These findings illuminate empirical evidence indicating that viewable inequality degrades cooperation and they show how a standard feature of evolutionary game models—viz. the aggregation of payoffs during a generation—can double as an information mechanism that facilitates positive assortment.
format	article
author	Tim Johnson Oleg Smirnov
author_facet	Tim Johnson Oleg Smirnov
author_sort	Tim Johnson
title	Inequality as information: Wealth homophily facilitates the evolution of cooperation
title_short	Inequality as information: Wealth homophily facilitates the evolution of cooperation
title_full	Inequality as information: Wealth homophily facilitates the evolution of cooperation
title_fullStr	Inequality as information: Wealth homophily facilitates the evolution of cooperation
title_full_unstemmed	Inequality as information: Wealth homophily facilitates the evolution of cooperation
title_sort	inequality as information: wealth homophily facilitates the evolution of cooperation
publisher	Nature Portfolio
publishDate	2018
url	https://doaj.org/article/110b301bf25d452f8ef964dd965c0a8e
work_keys_str_mv	AT timjohnson inequalityasinformationwealthhomophilyfacilitatestheevolutionofcooperation AT olegsmirnov inequalityasinformationwealthhomophilyfacilitatestheevolutionofcooperation
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Inequality as information: Wealth homophily facilitates the evolution of cooperation

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