High Cost of Survival Promotes the Evolution of Cooperation

Oleg Smirnov ()
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Oleg Smirnov: Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA

Games, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Living organisms expend energy to sustain survival, a process which is reliant on consuming resources—termed here as the “cost of survival”. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), a classic model of social interaction, individual payoffs depend on choices to either provide benefits to others at a personal cost (cooperate) or exploit others to maximize personal gain (defect). We demonstrate that in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD), a simple “Always Cooperate” (ALLC) strategy evolves and remains evolutionarily stable when the cost of survival is sufficiently high, meaning exploited cooperators have a low probability of survival. We derive a rule for the evolutionary stability of cooperation, x/z > T/R , where x represents the duration of mutual cooperation, z the duration of exploitation, T the defector’s free-riding payoff, and R the payoff for mutual cooperation. This finding suggests that higher survival costs can enhance social welfare by selecting for cooperative strategies.

Keywords: evolution of cooperation; prisoner’s dilemma; altruism; survival; reciprocity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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