Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Toulouse, France.
Max Planck Research Group Dynamics of Social Behavior, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany.
Nat Commun. 2023 Jul 12;14(1):4153. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-39625-9.
Many human interactions feature the characteristics of social dilemmas where individual actions have consequences for the group and the environment. The feedback between behavior and environment can be studied with the framework of stochastic games. In stochastic games, the state of the environment can change, depending on the choices made by group members. Past work suggests that such feedback can reinforce cooperative behaviors. In particular, cooperation can evolve in stochastic games even if it is infeasible in each separate repeated game. In stochastic games, participants have an interest in conditioning their strategies on the state of the environment. Yet in many applications, precise information about the state could be scarce. Here, we study how the availability of information (or lack thereof) shapes evolution of cooperation. Already for simple examples of two state games we find surprising effects. In some cases, cooperation is only possible if there is precise information about the state of the environment. In other cases, cooperation is most abundant when there is no information about the state of the environment. We systematically analyze all stochastic games of a given complexity class, to determine when receiving information about the environment is better, neutral, or worse for evolution of cooperation.
许多人类互动都具有社会困境的特点，即个人行为会对群体和环境产生影响。行为与环境之间的反馈可以用随机博弈的框架来研究。在随机博弈中，环境的状态可以根据群体成员的选择而改变。过去的研究表明，这种反馈可以加强合作行为。具体来说，即使在每个单独的重复博弈中合作是不可行的，合作也可以在随机博弈中演变。在随机博弈中，参与者有兴趣根据环境的状态来调整自己的策略。然而，在许多应用中，关于状态的精确信息可能很稀缺。在这里，我们研究信息的可用性（或缺乏）如何塑造合作的演变。即使对于两个状态的简单游戏示例，我们也发现了令人惊讶的效果。在某些情况下，如果有关于环境状态的精确信息，合作才是可能的。在其他情况下，当没有关于环境状态的信息时，合作是最丰富的。我们系统地分析了给定复杂度类的所有随机博弈，以确定何时获得有关环境的信息对合作的演变是有利、中立还是不利。
