Disordered environments in spatial games

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2001 Nov;64(5 Pt 1):051905. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.64.051905. Epub 2001 Oct 22.

Abstract

The Prisoner's dilemma is the main game theoretical framework in which the onset and maintainance of cooperation in biological populations is studied. In the spatial version of the model, we study the robustness of cooperation in heterogeneous ecosystems in spatial evolutionary games by considering site diluted lattices. The main result is that, due to disorder, the fraction of cooperators in the population is enhanced. Moreover, the system presents a dynamical transition at rho*, separating a region with spatial chaos from one with localized, stable groups of cooperators.