Strategy intervention for the evolution of fairness

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 13; no. 5; p. e0196524
• Main Authors: Zhang, Yanling, Fu, Feng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 02-05-2018; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Altruism; Altruism (Human behavior); Antisocial behavior; Behavioral evolution; Biology and Life Sciences; Competition; Cooperation; Evolution; Evolution & development; Experiments; Fairness; Game theory; Influence; Intervention; Migration; Mutation; Physical Sciences; Population number; Populations; Preferences; Rejection; Social science research; Social Sciences; Strategy; Beijing China; United States > US
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0196524

The 'irrational' preference for fairness has attracted increasing attention. Although previous studies have focused on the effects of spitefulness on the evolution of fairness, they did not consider non-monotonic rejections shown in behavioral experiments. In this paper, we introduce a non-monotonic rejection in an evolutionary model of the Ultimatum Game. We propose strategy intervention to study the evolution of fairness in general structured populations. By sequentially adding five strategies into the competition between a fair strategy and a selfish strategy, we arrive at the following conclusions. First, the evolution of fairness is inhibited by altruism, but it is promoted by spitefulness. Second, the non-monotonic rejection helps fairness overcome selfishness. Particularly for group-structured populations, we analytically investigate how fairness, selfishness, altruism, and spitefulness are affected by population size, mutation, and migration in the competition among seven strategies. Our results may provide important insights into understanding the evolutionary origin of fairness.