Co-action provides rational basis for the evolution of cooperation

How cooperation can originate and be maintained in a society of selfish individuals is one of the central questions in evolutionary biology and social sciences. Formally, it can be posed in the context of the Iterated Prisoners Dilemma (IPD) game where agents interact by either cooperating or defecting in each round, based on the information about their choices in previous rounds of the game. It has been recently shown that social dilemmas arising in single-stage games can be resolved in the co-action framework when the agents are in a completely symmetric situation. Here we examine the IPD from a co-action perspective and show that it allows cooperation to emerge and subsequently be sustained even in the presence of noise. Specifically, we show that the co-action equilibrium for an N -player IPD is a state in which a majority of cooperators coexist with defectors, the exact composition being determined by the ratio of the payoffs. For an IPD between two players, we show that the co-action solution corresponds to a win-stay, lose-shift behavioral rule, thereby providing a rational basis for this Pavlovian strategy.

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