Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/330118 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Citation: 
[Journal:] Games [ISSN:] 2073-4336 [Volume:] 16 [Issue:] 1 [Article No.:] 4 [Year:] 2025 [Pages:] 1-12
Publisher: 
MDPI, Basel
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.
Subjects: 
evolution of cooperation
prisoner's dilemma
altruism
survival
reciprocity
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
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