Complexity Digest 2010.23 - 12.03

2010/11/05

Editor-in-Chief: Carlos Gershenson
Founding Editor: Gottfried Mayer

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How Wealth Accumulation Can Promote Cooperation, PLoS ONE 5(10) Bookmark and Share

Excerpt: Here, we report the emergence, survival, and frequent domination of cooperation in a world characterized by selfishness and a strong temptation to defect, when individuals can accumulate wealth. In particular, we study games with local adaptation such as the prisoner's dilemma, to which we add heterogeneity in payoffs. In our model, agents accumulate wealth and invest some of it in their interactions. The larger the investment, the more can potentially be gained or lost, so that present gains affect future payoffs. We find that cooperation survives for a far wider range of parameters than without wealth accumulation and, even more strikingly, that it often dominates defection.