ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2023
Small bots, big impact: solving the conundrum of cooperation in optional Prisoner's Dilemma game through simple strategies.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cooperation, Defection, and Collapse: A Multiscale Game Theory Framework for Emphysema Progression.Cells · 2026Review
- Stigmergic influence of simple bots on human cooperation in digital environments.EPJ data science · 2026Article
- Evolution of trust in theJournal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Cooperative bots exhibit nuanced effects on cooperation across strategic frameworks.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Investigating the impact of environmental feedback on the optional prisoner's dilemma for insights into cyclic dominance and evolution of cooperation.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Emergence of cooperation in the one-shot Prisoner's dilemma through Discriminatory and Samaritan AIs.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Enhancing social cohesion with cooperative bots in societies of greedy, mobile individuals.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Cooperation plays a crucial role in both nature and human society, and the conundrum of cooperation attracts the attention from interdisciplinary research. In this study, we investigated the evolution of cooperation in optional Prisoner's Dilemma games by introducing simple bots. We focused on one-shot and anonymous games, where the bots could be programmed to always cooperate, always defect, never participate or choose each action with equal probability. Our results show that cooperative bots facilitate the emergence of cooperation among ordinary players in both well-mixed populations and a regular lattice under weak imitation scenarios. Introducing loner bots has no impact on the emergence of cooperation in well-mixed populations, but it facilitates the dominance of cooperation in regular lattices under strong imitation scenarios. However, too many loner bots on a regular lattice inhibit the spread of cooperation and can eventually result in a breakdown of cooperation. Our findings emphasize the significance of bot design in promoting cooperation and offer useful insights for encouraging cooperation in real-world scenarios.
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