An Agent-Based Model for Evolution of Cooperation With Proactive Information Gathering

This paper explores a new model to investigate the impact of proactive information gathering upon the evolution of cooperation among self-interested agents in a multiagent system. It builds upon an existing game-theoretical model of spatially distributed mobile agent population with the energy-based individual life cycle. Respective agents keep playing one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma games in neighbourhood encounters. Agents in the new model can dynamically adjust their strategies towards different types of opponents. Simulation experiments are carried out on establishing patterns of how this ability impacts the evolution of cooperation in the presence of varying levels of environmental adversity. The results show that cooperation prevails in a substantially larger area of parameter space than in the basic model without information gathering.