The effect of environmental information on evolution of cooperation in stochastic games

In stochastic games, there is a feedback loop between a group's social behaviors and its environment. Kleshnina et al. show that groups are often more cooperative when they know the exact state of their environment, although there are also intriguing cases when ignorance is beneficial. Many human interactions feature the characteristics of social dilemmas where individual actions have consequences for the group and the environment. The feedback between behavior and environment can be studied with the framework of stochastic games. In stochastic games, the state of the environment can change, depending on the choices made by group members. Past work suggests that such feedback can reinforce cooperative behaviors. In particular, cooperation can evolve in stochastic games even if it is infeasible in each separate repeated game. In stochastic games, participants have an interest in conditioning their strategies on the state of the environment. Yet in many applications, precise information about the state could be scarce. Here, we study how the availability of information (or lack thereof) shapes evolution of cooperation. Already for simple examples of two state games we find surprising effects. In some cases, cooperation is only possible if there is precise information about the state of the environment. In other cases, cooperation is most abundant when there is no information about the state of the environment. We systematically analyze all stochastic games of a given complexity class, to determine when receiving information about the environment is better, neutral, or worse for evolution of cooperation.

Automated summary

In stochastic games, the feedback loop between social behaviors and the environment plays a crucial role. Precise knowledge of the environment often leads to more cooperation, but there are cases where ignorance can also be beneficial. This study examines the impact of information availability on the evolution of cooperation in stochastic games.