Evolution of cooperation among autonomous agents in the presence of public information

In games like prisoner’s dilemma and the public goods game, defection is theoretically the dominant strategy. It is hard to sustain cooperation in classical repeated games in a well-mixed population. The aim of this project was to understand the evolution of cooperation in such social dilemmas, especially in the presence of public information. For example, public information like "reputation" of an agent is something that may influence the behaviour of other agents. Under the guidance of Dr. M.S. Santhanam, I used evolutionary game theory and agent-based modelling for this analysis. Another aspect I explored was the effect of the underlying network topology of the agents, which determined their influence on other agents.

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