Evolution of cooperation in social dilemmas with assortment in finite populations

Abstract

We investigate conditions for the evolution of cooperation in social dilemmas in finite populations with assortment of players by group founders and general payoff functions for cooperation and defection within groups. Using a diffusion approximation in the limit of a large population size that does not depend on the precise updating rule, we show that the first-order effect of selection on the fixation probability of cooperation when represented once can be expressed as the difference between time-averaged payoffs with respect to effective time that cooperators and defectors spend in direct competition in the different group states. Comparing this fixation probability to its value under neutrality and to the corresponding fixation probability for defection, we deduce conditions for the evolution of cooperation. We show that these conditions are generally less stringent as the level of assortment increases under a wide range of assumptions on the payoffs such as additive, synergetic or discounted benefits for cooperation, fixed cost for cooperation and threshold benefit functions. This is not necessarily the case, however, when payoffs in pairwise interactions are multiplicatively compounded within groups.