Evolutionary game dynamics in multiagent systems with prosocial and antisocial exclusion strategies

• DOI: 10.1016/j.knosys.2019.07.006
• Publication Date: 2019-07-09T15:27:24Z
• Authors: Linjie Liu; Xiaojie Chen
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; 03 medical and health sciences

Abstract Cooperation is very important in human society and identified as an essential principle of evolution, but how to promote cooperation among rational individuals remains a huge challenge. Recent works have found that prosocial exclusion can work as a powerful control strategy to promote cooperation effectively. However, it remains unclear whether prosocial exclusion can still favor cooperation when antisocial exclusion is introduced. And does prosocial exclusion have evolutionary advantages when comparing with prosocial and antisocial punishment strategies? To address these issues, we first introduce prosocial and antisocial pool exclusion strategies into the public goods game and study the stationary distribution of each strategy in finite well-mixed populations. We find that the introduction of antisocial exclusion inhibits cooperation, but it does not reduce the evolutionary advantage of prosocial exclusion. We then investigate the competition between the full set of pool exclusion and pool punishment strategies, and reveal that prosocial pool excluders can do better than other strategists no matter whether the second-order sanctioning is considered or not. Our results suggest that social exclusion is a better way for restraining defection than costly punishment, even when antisocial behavior is allowed.