The evolution of cooperation under falsified payoff information

Abstract

Maximizing payoff is individuals’ pursuit during games, and thus payoff information profoundly affects individuals’ strategic choices. However, the privatization of payoff information provides individuals with opportunities for pretense and deception, and it is commonplace for individuals to induce their opponents to cooperate with them by declaring false payoff information in order to obtain a future advantage. This begs the question of how false payoff information disseminated by individuals for self-interested purposes affects humans’ strategy selection, and whether it inevitably has a negative impact on human cooperation. In view of this, this paper focuses on the impact of different deceivers, i.e., cooperative deceiver, defective deceiver, and dual-mode deceiver, on the evolution of cooperation, in the context that players can choose to declare false payoff information depending on their game situation. The results showed that all three types of deceivers can positively influence the evolution of cooperation, despite the self-interested initial intent of their deception, especially the dual-mode deceivers who most notably drove group cooperation by their flexibility in deceiving. In addition, compared to cooperative deceivers, defective deceivers perform better, i.e., defectors understate their payoff is more favorable to group cooperation than cooperators overstate their payoff. Moreover, in some of the tougher dilemmas, the defective deceivers can drive the group to achieve a reversal in the cooperation rate, which triggers a series of interesting and counterintuitive phenomena.