Nature: Evolution of cooperation in stochastic games

Not easy to follow, there are diamonds in this paper. The reason for tacking this paper comes from:

Social dilemmas occur when incentives for individuals are misaligned with group interests1–7. According to the ‘tragedy of the commons’, these misalignments can lead to overexploitation and collapse of public resources. The resulting behaviours can be analysed with the tools of game theory8. The theory of direct reciprocity9–15 suggests that repeated interactions can alleviate such dilemmas, but previous work has assumed that the public resource remains constant over time. Here we introduce the idea that the public resource is instead changeable and depends on the strategic choices of individuals. An intuitive scenario is that cooperation increases the public resource, whereas defection decreases it. Thus, cooperation allows the possibility of playing a more valuable game with higher payoffs, whereas defection leads to a less valuable game. . . .​

We know that living efficiently results in savings to the individual and society. Yet the tragedy of the commons continues to bedevil species. This paper suggests a better approach is to make sure the consequences, the loss of resources, are as immediate as possible to improve cooperation and prevent defections by those who would exhaust it.

Bob Wilson