The cost and benefit of deception

Imagine the police arrest you and a colleague for some crime and offer individual deals if you will betray each other. If only one of you defects, that person goes free while the other, the cooperator, receives three years in prison. Mutual defection gets both of you a two-year sentence, and mutual cooperation results in a one-year sentence. That game theory scenario is called the prisoner’s dilemma. Versions of it, often involving many players who adapt their strategies as they repeatedly play the game, have been used to study how cooperative behavior might evolve in a population of competing individuals. Now Attila Szolnoki of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Matjaž Perc of the University of Maribor in Slovenia and King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia have introduced deception to the game. They ran Monte Carlo simulations with up to 3.6 × 10⁷ players interacting on a square lattice....