RT Journal Article
T1 The Joker effect: cooperation driven by destructive agents
A1 Arenas, Alex
A1 Camacho, Juan
A1 Cuesta, José A.
A1 Requejo, Rubén J.
AB Understanding the emergence of cooperation is a central issue in evolutionary game theory. The hardest setup for the attainment of cooperation in a population of individuals is the Public Goods game in which cooperative agents generate a common good at their own expenses, while defectors "free-ride" this good. Eventually this causes the exhaustion of the good, a situation which is bad for everybody. Previous results have shown that introducing reputation, allowing for volunteer participation, punishing defectors, rewarding cooperators or structuring agents, can enhance cooperation. Here we present a model which shows how the introduction of rare, malicious agents &- that we term jokers &- performing just destructive actions on the other agents induce bursts of cooperation. The appearance of jokers promotes a rock-paper-scissors dynamics, where jokers outbeat defectors and cooperators outperform jokers, which are subsequently invaded by defectors. Thus, paradoxically, the existence of destructive agents acting indiscriminately promotes cooperation.
PB Elsevier
SN 0022-5193
YR 2011
FD 2011-06-21
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/20071
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/20071
LA eng
NO Financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologíıa (Spain) under projects FIS2009-13730-C02-02 (A.A.),FIS2009-13370-C02-01 (J.C. and R.J.R.) and MOSAICO(J.A.C.); from the Director, Office of Science, Computationaland Technology Research, U.S. Department of Energyunder Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 (A.A.); fromthe Barcelona Graduate School of Economics and of theGovernment of Catalonia (A.A.); from the Generalitat deCatalunya under project 2009SGR0838 (A.A.) 2009SGR0164(J.C. and R.J.R.) and from Comunidad de Madrid under projectMODELICO-CM (J.A.C.). R.J.R. acknowledges the financialsupport of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (PIF grant)and the Spanish government (FPU grant).
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RD 27 jul. 2024