Nash equilibrium mapping vs Hamiltonian dynamics vs Darwinian evolution for some social dilemma games in the thermodynamic limit

How cooperation evolves and manifests itself in the thermodynamic or infinite player limit of social dilemma games is a matter of intense speculation. Various analytical methods have been proposed to analyse the thermodynamic limit of social dilemmas. In a previous work [Chaos Solitons and fractals...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc
Main Authors Arjun Krishnan U M, Benjamin, Colin
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 01.01.2021
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Summary:How cooperation evolves and manifests itself in the thermodynamic or infinite player limit of social dilemma games is a matter of intense speculation. Various analytical methods have been proposed to analyse the thermodynamic limit of social dilemmas. In a previous work [Chaos Solitons and fractals 135, 109762(2020)] involving one among us, two of those methods, Hamiltonian Dynamics(HD) and Nash equilibrium(NE) mapping were compared. The inconsistency and incorrectness of HD approach vis-a-vis NE mapping was brought to light. In this work we compare a third analytical method, i.e, Darwinian evolution(DE) with NE mapping and a numerical agent based approach. For completeness, we give results for HD approach as well. In contrast to HD which involves maximisation of payoffs of all individuals, in DE, payoff of a single player is maximised with respect to its nearest neighbour. While, HD utterly fails as compared to NE mapping, DE method gives a false positive for game magnetisation -- the net difference between the fraction of cooperators and defectors -- when payoffs obey the condition a+d=b+c, wherein a, d represent the diagonal elements and b, c the off diagonal elements in symmetric social dilemma games. When either a+d =/= b+c or, when one looks at average payoff per player, DE method fails much like the HD approach. NE mapping and numerical agent based method on the other hand agree really well for both game magnetisation as well as average payoff per player for the social dilemmas in question, i.e., Hawk-Dove game and Public goods game. This paper thus bring to light the inconsistency of the DE method vis-a-vis both NE mapping as well as a numerical agent based approach.