ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Collapse of cooperation in evolving games.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 67 papers.
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Who cites it
67 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- From simultaneous to leader-follower play in direct reciprocity.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- The key role of cheaters in the persistence of cooperation.BMC biology · 2026Article
- The paradox of intervention: Resilience in adaptive multirole coordination networks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A multi-agent reinforcement learning framework for exploring dominant strategies in iterated and evolutionary games.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Exact conditions for evolutionary stability in indirect reciprocity under noise.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Evolutionary dynamics of behavioral motivations for cooperation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Dynamics of cooperation in concurrent games.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Repeated games with partner choice.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Empirical evidence of resource dependent evolution of payoff matrices in Saccharomyces cerevisiae populations.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2025Article
- Time-Dependent Strategies in Repeated Asymmetric Public Goods Games.Dynamic games and applications · 2025Article
- Conditional cooperation with longer memory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Evolution of cooperation in multichannel games on multiplex networks.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- The key role of cheaters in the persistence of cooperation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Evolution of reciprocity with limited payoff memory.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The distorting effects of producer strategies: Why engagement does not reveal consumer preferences for misinformation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Efficiency and resilience of cooperation in asymmetric social dilemmas.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Can institutions foster cooperation by wealth redistribution?Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Evolution of a theory of mind.iScience · 2024Article
7 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Game theory provides a quantitative framework for analyzing the behavior of rational agents. The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma in particular has become a standard model for studying cooperation and cheating, with cooperation often emerging as a robust outcome in evolving populations. Here we extend evolutionary game theory by allowing players' payoffs as well as their strategies to evolve in response to selection on heritable mutations. In nature, many organisms engage in mutually beneficial interactions and individuals may seek to change the ratio of risk to reward for cooperation by altering the resources they commit to cooperative interactions. To study this, we construct a general framework for the coevolution of strategies and payoffs in arbitrary iterated games. We show that, when there is a tradeoff between the benefits and costs of cooperation, coevolution often leads to a dramatic loss of cooperation in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. The collapse of cooperation is so extreme that the average payoff in a population can decline even as the potential reward for mutual cooperation increases. Depending upon the form of tradeoffs, evolution may even move away from the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game altogether. Our work offers a new perspective on the Prisoner's Dilemma and its predictions for cooperation in natural populations; and it provides a general framework to understand the coevolution of strategies and payoffs in iterated interactions.
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