Volunteering as Red Queen Mechanism for Cooperation in Public Goods Games
Christoph Hauert,12
Silvia De Monte,13
Josef Hofbauer,1
Karl Sigmund14*
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.
1 Institute for Mathematics, University of
Vienna, Strudlhofgasse 4, A-1090 Vienna, Austria.
2 Department of Zoology, University of British
Columbia, 6270 University Boulevard, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z4.
3 Department of Physics, Danish Technical
University, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark.
4 International Institute for Applied Systems
Analysis (IIASA), A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria.
*
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
karl.sigmund{at}univie.ac.at
