Promoting Cooperation through External Interference

The problem of promoting the evolution of cooperative behaviour within populations of self-regarding individuals has been intensively investigated across diverse fields of behavioural, social and computational sciences (Nowak, 2006; Perc et al., 2017). In most studies, cooperation is assumed to emerge from the combined actions of participating individuals within the populations, without taking into account the possibility of external interference and how it can be performed in a cost-efficient way. However, in many scenarios, cooperative behaviours are advocated and promoted by an exogenous decision maker, who is not part of the system (e.g. the United Nation interferes in political systems for conflict resolution or the World Wildlife Fund organisation interferes in ecosystems to maintain biodiversity). Thus, a new set of heuristics capable of engineering a desired collective behaviour in a self-organised multiagent system is required. Here we summarize our recent works to bridge this gap, in which we employ theoretical analysis and computer simulations based on evolutionary game theory (Nowak, 2006), to study cost-efficient interference strategies for enhancing cooperation in the context of cooperation dilemma games, for both well-mixed (Han and Tran-Thanh, 2018) and square-lattice structured populations (Han et al., 2018).