Global community structure allows emergence of cooperation in spatial prisoner’s dilemma

Abstract

Prisoner’s dilemma (PD), arguably the most studied system in game theory, suggests that defection (confess in PD) is typically a more preferred strategy (or the Nash equilibrium) than cooperation (deny in PD). In general, this result is in conflict with the prevalent view that cooperation exists in all levels of biological hierarchy. Here, we build from the spatial prisoner’s dilemma recently implemented by Helbing and Yu [PNAS 2009] and we show that cooperation can be evolved by simply introducing global rules aimed at benefitting the entire community. The work complements previous results showing that combination of local interaction and imitation is the key for cooperation to emerge.