Emergence of oscillatory cooperation in a population with incomplete information

Jing Zhang, Zhao Li, Jiqiang Zhang, Lin Ma, Guozhong Zheng and Li Chen

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2023, vol. 617, issue C

Abstract: Oscillatory behaviors are ubiquitous in nature and the human society. However, most previous works fail to reproduce them in the two-strategy game-theoretical models. Here we show that oscillatory behaviors naturally emerge if incomplete information is incorporated into the cooperation evolution of a non-Markov model. Specifically, we consider a population playing prisoner’s dilemma game, where each individual can only probabilistically get access to their neighbors’ payoff information and store them within their memory with a given length. They make their decisions based upon these memories. Interestingly, we find that the level of cooperation generally cannot stabilize but render quasi-periodic oscillation, and this observation is strengthened for a longer memory and a smaller information acquisition probability. The mechanism uncovered shows that there are misperceived payoffs of the player’s neighborhood, facilitating the growth of cooperators and defectors at different stages that leads to oscillatory behaviors as a result. Our findings are robust to the underlying structure of the population. Given the omnipresence of incomplete information, our findings may provide a plausible explanation for the phenomenon of oscillatory behaviors in the real world.

Keywords: Cooperation; Evolutionary game theory; Prisoner’s dilemma; Oscillation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:617:y:2023:i:c:s0378437123002376

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2023.128682

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