Tag-based indirect reciprocity by incomplete social information

Abstract

Evolution of altruistic behaviour in interacting individuals is accounted for by, for example, kin selection, direct reciprocity, spatially limited interaction and indirect reciprocity. Real social agents, particularly humans, often take actions based on similarity between themselves and others. Although tag-based indirect reciprocity in which altruism occurs exclusively among similar flocks is a natural expectation, its mechanism has not really been established. We propose a model of tag-based indirect reciprocity by assuming that each player may note strategies of others. We show that tag-based altruism can evolve to eradicate other strategies, including unconditional defectors for various initial strategy configurations and parameter sets. A prerequisite for altruism is that the strategy is sometimes, but not always, visible to others. Without visibility of strategies, policing does not take place and defection is optimal. With perfect visibility, what a player does is always witnessed by others and cooperation is optimal. In the intermediate regime, discriminators based on tag proximity, rather than mixture of generous players and defectors, are most likely to evolve. In this situation, altruism is realized based on homophily in which players are exclusively good to similar others.