Evidence map›Paper›PMID 36697467›Full record

ArticleScientific reports2023

Diversity enables the jump towards cooperation for the Traveler's Dilemma.

María Alejandra Ramírez, Matteo Smerlak, Arne Traulsen, Jürgen Jost

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
4citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

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Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

4 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Evolution of noisy learning in games.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026
    Article
  2. The dynamics of cooperation in asymmetric public goods games.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026
    Article
  3. Review
  4. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors.

María Alejandra RamírezMax Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, 24306, Germany. ramirez@mis.mpg.de.
Matteo SmerlakMax Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, 04103, Germany.
Arne TraulsenMax Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, 24306, Germany.
Jürgen JostMax Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, 04103, Germany.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Social dilemmas are situations in which collective welfare is at odds with individual gain. One widely studied example, due to the conflict it poses between human behaviour and game theoretic reasoning, is the Traveler's Dilemma. The dilemma relies on the players' incentive to undercut their opponent at the expense of losing a collective high payoff. Such individual incentive leads players to a systematic mutual undercutting until the lowest possible payoff is reached, which is the game's unique Nash equilibrium. However, if players were satisfied with a high payoff -that is not necessarily higher than their opponent's- they would both be better off individually and collectively. Here, we explain how it is possible to converge to this cooperative high payoff equilibrium. Our analysis focuses on decomposing the dilemma into a local and a global game. We show that players need to escape the local maximisation and jump to the global game, in order to reach the cooperative equilibrium. Using a dynamic approach, based on evolutionary game theory and learning theory models, we find that diversity, understood as the presence of suboptimal strategies, is the general mechanism that enables the jump towards cooperation.

Indexed as

Cooperative BehaviorProblem SolvingBiological EvolutionGame TheoryHumansPrisoner DilemmaRecords

Identifiers

PMID36697467
PMCPMC9876901

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.