Update Dynamics, Strategy Exchanges and the Evolution of Cooperation in the Snowdrift Game

Abstract

Abstract. We verify through numerical simulations that the influence of the update dynamics on the evolution of cooperation in the Snowdrift game is closely related to the number of strategy exchanges between agents. The results show that strategy exchanges contribute to the destruction of compact clusters favorable to cooperator agents. In general, strategy exchanges decrease as the synchrony rate decreases. This explains why smaller synchrony rates are beneficial to cooperators in situations where a large number of exchanges occur with synchronous updating. On the other hand, this is coherent with the fact that the Snowdrift game is completely insensitive to the synchrony rate when the replicator dynamics transition rule is used: there are almost no strategy exchanges when this rule is used.