title: Cooperation and age structure in spatial games.
abstract: We study the evolution of cooperation in evolutionary spatial games when the payoff correlates with the increasing age of players (the level of correlation is set through a single parameter, α). The demographic heterogeneous age distribution, directly affecting the outcome of the game, is thus shown to be responsible for enhancing the cooperative behavior in the population. In particular, moderate values of α allow cooperators not only to survive but to outcompete defectors, even when the temptation to defect is large and the ageless, standard α=0 model does not sustain cooperation. The interplay between age structure and noise is also considered, and we obtain the conditions for optimal levels of cooperation.
authors.affiliation: School of Physics, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China.
authors.forename: Zhen
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Zhen
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Xiaodan
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.forename: Jeferson J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Arenzon
mesh_terms: D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005716:Game Theory; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D012201:Reward