The Evolvability of Cooperation under Local and Non-Local Mutations

Alexander J. Stewart and Joshua B. Plotkin
Additional contact information
Alexander J. Stewart: Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
Joshua B. Plotkin: Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

Games, 2015, vol. 6, issue 3, 1-20

Abstract: We study evolutionary dynamics in a population of individuals engaged in pairwise social interactions, encoded as iterated games. We consider evolution within the space of memory-1strategies, and we characterize all evolutionary robust outcomes, as well as their tendency to evolve under the evolutionary dynamics of the system. When mutations are restricted to be local, as opposed to non-local, then a wider range of evolutionary robust outcomes tend to emerge, but mutual cooperation is more difficult to evolve. When we further allow heritable mutations to the player’s investment level in each cooperative interaction, then co-evolution leads to changes in the payoff structure of the game itself and to specific pairings of robust games and strategies in the population. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of the genetic architectures that encode how an individual expresses its strategy or investment.

Keywords: cooperation; evolvability; adaptive dynamics; iterated games; memory-1 strategies; payoff evolution; evolution of investment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/6/3/231/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/6/3/231/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jgames:v:6:y:2015:i:3:p:231-250:d:53098

Access Statistics for this article

Games is currently edited by Ms. Susie Huang

More articles in Games from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().