Reciprocity evolves more readily in competitive than cooperative socio-ecologies

Tracking what others did and matching other’s expected actions is seen across a range of biological systems. As reciprocal matching rewards and reinforces cooperators and punishes and discourages non-cooperators, reciprocal matching can help communal living. The strength of reciprocity as a social strategy also comes from its success in protecting the individual against the risk of exploitation by punishing defectors. Although often overlooked, this feature carries a strong weight when exploitation risk is high. Here, we use evolutionary agent-based simulations to examine how reciprocal matching evolves across competitive socio-ecologies with a high risk of exploitation and cooperative socio-ecologies with a lower risk of exploitation. Results show that reciprocal matching as a social strategy for communal living evolves more readily in more competitive socio-ecologies where risk of exploitation is high. Results also hold in standard prisoner’s dilemmas with its equilibrium in single st..., , # Reciprocity evolves more readily in competitive than cooperative socio-ecologies

[Access this dataset on Dryad](https://datadryad.org/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.bcc2fqzrb)

This repository contains all materials necessary to replicate the study:

**Reciprocity as a social strategy evolves more readily under conflict rather than cooperation**
*by A. Romano, A. S. Saral, and C. K. W. De Dreu*

The study is an agent-based simulation. The data contained in this repository is the output of the simulation. It also contains files to run the simulations locally or on a cloud.

We used Python for the simulations and R for the analysis/plots.

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## Description of the data and file structure

### Code

* `code/simulation/` – Simulation code (Python3). This folder contains the code for the agent-based simulations. The main files, `simulate.py` and `simulate_tft.py` files execute the two simulations we used in the paper. See the content of these two files for the parameter.
* `code/simulation/a...,