Game Theory and Cooperation in Nature
Source: https://www.quantamagazine.org/game-theory-explains-how-cooperation-evolved-20150212/
This article written by Emily Singer highlights some of the research going into how game theory relates to cooperation in nature. Singer presents multiple points of view from various researchers that all shed light on how problems like the prisoner dilemma can help us determine when cooperating and defecting strategies work in nature. Singer writes about how Freeman Dyson and William Press proposed a new solution to the prisoner’s dilemma that challenged the idea that the prisoner’s dilemma explained why cooperation works in nature. The researchers found that a defecting strategy would work if one player found an opponent that is willing to cooperate even if the other player chooses to defect sometimes. Basically, the defector would only choose to defect up until the point where the cooperator stops cooperating. By doing this, the cooperator will not change its strategy and the defector can occasionally get a better payoff. This strategy works when you run through the prisoner’s dilemma several times with the same two players. Singer then mentions how Joshua Plotkin and Alexander Stewart, more researchers, modified the previous idea into by taking into account how these strategies would work in an “evolving group”. They found that cooperation was more popular in this model. The key difference between this updated model and the previous one is that defectors now run the risk of meeting with another defector and then both resulting with a poor payoff. As shown by some real-world examples, some players even avoided cooperating with defectors completely, further discouraging the defector strategy. Further into the article, we find that depending on how the models are structured, the results can lean either way.
This article was interesting as it relates the prisoner’s dilemma to real-world scenarios, some of which go beyond human society. The article effectively demonstrates the many different ways that this problem can be interpreted, how the slightest change in the interpretation of the problem can sway the result and how this all ties into real networks between animals in nature.