Emergence and suppression of cooperation by action visibility in transparent games

PLoS Comput Biol. 2020 Jan 9;16(1):e1007588. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007588. eCollection 2020 Jan.

Abstract

Real-world agents, humans as well as animals, observe each other during interactions and choose their own actions taking the partners' ongoing behaviour into account. Yet, classical game theory assumes that players act either strictly sequentially or strictly simultaneously without knowing each other's current choices. To account for action visibility and provide a more realistic model of interactions under time constraints, we introduce a new game-theoretic setting called transparent games, where each player has a certain probability of observing the partner's choice before deciding on its own action. By means of evolutionary simulations, we demonstrate that even a small probability of seeing the partner's choice before one's own decision substantially changes the evolutionary successful strategies. Action visibility enhances cooperation in an iterated coordination game, but reduces cooperation in a more competitive iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. In both games, "Win-stay, lose-shift" and "Tit-for-tat" strategies are predominant for moderate transparency, while a "Leader-Follower" strategy emerges for high transparency. Our results have implications for studies of human and animal social behaviour, especially for the analysis of dyadic and group interactions.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Behavior, Animal
  • Computational Biology
  • Cooperative Behavior
  • Decision Making / physiology*
  • Game Theory*
  • Humans
  • Interpersonal Relations*
  • Models, Biological*

Grants and funding

We acknowledge funding from the Ministry for Science and Education of Lower Saxony and the Volkswagen Foundation through the program “Niedersächsisches Vorab,” https://www.volkswagenstiftung.de/unsere-foerderung/unser-foerderangebot-im-ueberblick/vorab.html. We acknowledge additional support by the Leibniz Association through funding for the Leibniz ScienceCampus Primate Cognition and the Max Planck Society, https://www.leibniz-gemeinschaft.de/en/home/. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.