Cooperation and Stability through Periodic Impulses

Bo-Yu Zhang, Ross Cressman and Yi Tao

PLOS ONE, 2010, vol. 5, issue 3, 1-7

Abstract: Basic games, where each individual chooses between two strategies, illustrate several issues that immediately emerge from the standard approach that applies strategic reasoning, based on rational decisions, to predict population behavior where no rationality is assumed. These include how mutual cooperation (which corresponds to the best outcome from the population perspective) can evolve when the only individually rational choice is to defect, illustrated by the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game, and how individuals can randomize between two strategies when neither is individually rational, illustrated by the Battle of the Sexes (BS) game that models male-female conflict over parental investment in offspring. We examine these questions from an evolutionary perspective where the evolutionary dynamics includes an impulsive effect that models sudden changes in collective population behavior. For the PD game, we show analytically that cooperation can either coexist with defection or completely take over the population, depending on the strength of the impulse. By extending these results for the PD game, we also show that males and females each evolve to a single strategy in the BS game when the impulsive effect is strong and that weak impulses stabilize the randomized strategies of this game.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0009882 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 09882&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0009882

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009882

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().