The Way of the Loner

From this week's _Science_ ...

"A recurring problem in evolutionary biology and in human societies is how cooperative groups develop and survive. Cooperation among individuals can lead to greater goods, yet defectors within cooperative groups can reap greater benefits. Punishment only works in small groups where the culprits can be identified. Hauert et al. (p. 1129) leaven this mix of protagonists by adding a third type of agent, the loner. They show that the option to withdraw, or sit out, leads to dynamic coexistence of cooperators, defectors, and loners, with individuals rotating their behavior, as in the child's game of rock-paper-scissors."

Referenced article is:

"Volunteering as Red Queen Mechanism for Cooperation in
Public Goods Games"

Christoph Hauert, Silvia De Monte, Josef Hofbauer, Karl Sigmund

_Science_ Volume 296, Number 5570, Issue of 10 May 2002, pp. 1129-1132.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol296/issue5570/twis.shtml (requires subscription)

Abstract
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The evolution of cooperation among nonrelated individuals is
one of the fundamental problems in biology and social sciences.

Reciprocal altruism fails to provide a solution if interactions are not repeated often enough or groups are too large. Punishment and reward can be very effective but require that defectors can be traced and identified. Here we present a simple but effective mechanism operating under full anonymity. Optional participation can foil exploiters and overcome the social dilemma. In voluntary public goods
interactions, cooperators and defectors will coexist.

We show that this result holds under very diverse assumptions on population structure and adaptation mechanisms, leading usually not to an equilibrium but to an unending cycle of adjustments (a Red Queen type of evolution). Thus, voluntary participation offers an escape hatch out of some social traps. Cooperation can subsist in sizable groups even if interactions are not repeated, defectors remain anonymous, players have no memory, and assortment is purely random.

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