title: Evolutionary escape from the prisoner's dilemma.
abstract: The classic prisoner's dilemma model of game theory is modified by introducing occasional variations on the options available to players. Mutation and selection of game options reliably change the game matrix, gradually, from a prisoner's dilemma game into a byproduct mutualism one, in which cooperation is stable, and "temptation to defect" is replaced by temptation to cooperate. This result suggests that when there are many different potential ways of interacting, exploring those possibilities may make escape from prisoner's dilemmas a common outcome in the world. A consequence is that persistent prisoner's dilemma structures may be less common than one might otherwise expect.
authors.affiliation: Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1000, USA. worden@berkeley.edu
authors.forename: Lee
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Worden
authors.forename: Simon A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Levin
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001519:Behavior; D005075:Biological Evolution; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005716:Game Theory; D008954:Models, Biological