Unified and simple understanding for the evolution of conditional cooperators

Cooperation is a mysterious phenomenon which is observed in this world. The potential explanation is a repeated interaction. Cooperation is established if individuals meet the same opponent repeatedly and cooperate conditionally. Previous studies have analyzed the following four as characters of conditional cooperators mainly. (i) niceness (i.e., when a conditional cooperator meets an opponent in the first place, he (she) cooperates or defects), (ii) optimism (when a conditional cooperator meets an opponent in the past, but he (she) did not get access to information about the opponent's behavior in the previous round, he (she) cooperates or defects), (iii) generosity (even when a conditional cooperator knows that an opponent defected in the previous round, he (she) cooperates or defects) and (iv) retaliation (a conditional cooperator cooperates with a cooperator with a higher probability than with a defector). Previous works deal with these four characters mainly. However, these four characters basically have been regarded as distinct topics and unified understanding has not been done fully. Here we, by studying the iterated prisoner's dilemma game (in particular, additive games) and using evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) analysis, find that when retaliation is large, the condition, under which conditional cooperators are stable against the invasion by an unconditional defector is loose, while none of niceness, optimism, and generosity makes impact on the condition under which conditional cooperators are stable against an invasion by an unconditional defector. Furthermore, we show that we can understand niceness, optimism, and generosity uniformly by using one parameter indicating cooperative, and when the conditional cooperators have large retaliation enough to resist an invasion by an unconditional defector, natural selection favors more cooperative conditional cooperators to invade the resident conditional cooperative strategy. Moreover, we show that these results are robust even when taking the existence of mistakes in behavior into consideration. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.