Emergence and suppression of cooperation by action visibility in transparent games

Abstract

Real-world agents, humans as well as animals, observe each other during interactions and choose their own actions taking the partners' ongoing behaviour into account. Yet, classical game theory assumes that players act either strictly sequentially or strictly simultaneously without knowing each other's current choices. To account for action visibility and provide a more realistic model of interactions under time constraints, we introduce a new gametheoretic setting called transparent games, where each player has a certain probability of observing the partner's choice before deciding on its own action. By means of evolutionary simulations, we demonstrate that even a small probability of seeing the partner's choice before one's own decision substantially changes the evolutionary successful strategies. Action visibility enhances cooperation in an iterated coordination game, but reduces cooperation in a more competitive iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. In both games, "Win-stay, loseshift" and "Tit-for-tat" strategies are predominant for moderate transparency, while a "Leader-Follower" strategy emerges for high transparency. Our results have implications for studies of human and animal social behaviour, especially for the analysis of dyadic and group interactions.

Human and macaque pairs employ different coordination strategies in a transparent decision game

“…Yet, the analysis of action time distributions suggests that macaques employed a competitive version of turn-taking in which the faster agent selects its own color (insists) while the slower agent follows (accommodates). Such behavior would be in line with theoretical predictions derived from our evolutionary simulation (Unakafov et al, 2020), showing that competitive turn-taking provides the most effective strategy for a BoS type game when players have high probability to observe partner’s choices. To further test the hypothesis that this macaque pair developed a competitive Leader-Follower strategy, we performed a correlation analysis between the modeled visibility of the faster agent’s action by the slower agent and the observed likelihood of following to the faster agent’s color (the faster animal nearly always selected his own color).…”

“…Coordination is essential for maintaining cohesion between group members, avoiding conflicts, and achieving individual and joint action goals. Here we focus on understanding how such coordination can be achieved and maintained in a dyadic "transparent" setting in which agents can observe each other's ongoing actions and social cues (Unakafov et al, 2020(Unakafov et al, , 2019, like in many natural situations (Conty et al, 2012;Fruteau et al, 2013;Rizzolatti et al, 2001;Silk, 2007).…”

“…To account for changes in strategies during action visibility compared to "opaque" (simultaneous) choices, we recently developed the concept of "transparent games" that extends classical evolutionary game-theoretic analysis to real-time interactions in which the visibility of partners' actions depends on their relative action times (Unakafov et al, 2020(Unakafov et al, , 2019. Here, we use the theoretical insights from that work and analyze short-and long-term dynamics of choices, mutual information and action times in humans and rhesus monkeys playing a transparent version of an iterated movement-based BoS game.…”

Science-Driven Societal Transformation, Part I: Worldview

“…It stands to reason that the degree to which humans actually cooperate, and opportunities for cooperation, are strongly influenced by the design and function of societal systems. Studies in game theory and other fields identify key factors-rules, information processes, organizational structures, etc.-that promote or inhibit cooperation [68,[74][75][76][77][78].…”

The cone method: Inferring decision times from single-trial 3D movement trajectories in choice behavior

“…Other paradigms allow subjects to sequentially make multiple decisions within a given trial while continuously moving around the task environment (Diamond et al, 2017;Michalski et al, 2020), effectively abolishing the one-decision-per-trial structure for more naturalistic choice sequences. Also, coordination of action with others, be it in a cooperative or a competitive setting, requires continuous integration of selection and control when the opponents' actions are mutually visible and leads to specific dyadic choice behavior, like leader-follower strategies in transparent games (Möller et al, 2020;Unakafov et al, 2020).…”