The effects of time-varying rewards on the evolution of cooperation

Abstract

Understanding how cooperative behavior emerges within a population of autonomous individuals has been the focus of a great deal of research in biology, economics and more recently in the multi-agent systems domain. However, there are still many open questions. In this paper, we address some of these questions by investigating the effects of time-varying, non-symmetric rewards on the evolution of cooperation in the spatial Prisoner's dilemma game. The rationale behind this approach is based on the notion that the associated payoffs from pursuing certain strategies do vary among members of real-world populations. In our model, agents with limited cognitive capacity play the game with their loc..