The evolution of collaboration in symmetric 2x2-games with imperfect recognition of types

A recent series of papers has introduced a fresh perspective on the problem of the evolution of human cooperation by suggesting an amendment to the concept of cooperation itself: instead of thinking of cooperation as playing a particular strategy in a given game, usually C in the prisoner's dilemma, we could also think of cooperation as collaboration, i.e. as coalitional strategy choice, such as jointly switching from (D, D) to (C, C). The present paper complements previous work on collaboration by expanding on its genericity while relaxing the assumption that collaborators are able to perfectly identify their own kind. Conditions for the evolutionary viability of such collaboration under fairly undemanding assumptions about population and interaction structure are derived. Doing so, this paper shows that collaboration is an adaptive principle of strategy choice in a broad range of niches, i.e., stochastic mixtures of games. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.