Social experiments in the mesoscale: humans playing a spatial Prisoner's Dilemma Articles uri icon

publication date

  • November 2010

start page

  • 1

end page

  • 9

issue

  • 11

volume

  • 5(e13749)

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 1932-6203

abstract

  • The evolutionary origin of cooperation among unrelated individuals remains a key unsolved issue across several disciplines. Prominent among the several mechanisms proposed to explain how cooperation can emerge is the existence of a population structure that determines the interactions among individuals. Many models have explored analytically and by simulation the effects of such a structure, particularly in the framework of the Prisoner's Dilemma, but the results of these models largely depend on details such as the type of spatial structure or the evolutionary dynamics. Therefore, experimental work suitably designed to address this question is needed to probe these issues.

keywords

  • evolutionary games; cooperation; rules