Exploring the inducement for social dilemma and cooperation promotion mechanisms in structured populations

Investigating and addressing the issue of social dilemma is a continuing concern within the subject of behavioral sciences and collective cooperation. The research to date has mostly focused on outside control methods dealing with the existing dilemma rather than exploring the reason resulting in that inside. This work probes into the in-herent inducement for cooperation dilemma. We construct a gaming environment in which thousands of ran-dom memory-one strategies interact with each other on different complex topologies and record dominant strategies winning out from self-organized evolution. After clustering and analyzing evolutionary results, we find that the randomness and heterogeneity of population structure will strengthen the fitness of defectors. Besides, the cooperative willingness of individuals in betrayal situation has a decisive impact on the cooperation level of groups at equilibrium state. Further, we present two innovative treatments, enforcement and punish-ment mechanisms, to promote collective cooperation. The promoting effect is checked on various spatially networked topologies in the iterated prisoner's dilemma game. Simulation results indicate that irrespective of the underlying interaction network, the introduced promotion mechanisms are universally effective in subduing the evolutionary advantage of defectors, which favors the emergence and sustainability of cooperative behaviors. Our novel conclusions may provide some new perspectives for enhancing cooperation and elevating social wel-fare within biological systems and human societies.

Automated summary

This study investigates the internal motivation for cooperation dilemma and finds that the randomness and heterogeneity of population structure strengthen the fitness of defectors. It also reveals that the cooperative willingness of individuals in betrayal situations has a decisive impact on the cooperation level of groups. Additionally, the study proposes two innovative mechanisms, enforcement and punishment, to promote collective cooperation.