The evolution of cooperation by negotiation in a noisy world

Cooperative interactions among individuals are ubiquitous despite the possibility of exploitation by selfish free-riders. One mechanism that may promote cooperation is “negotiation”: individuals altering their behaviour in response to the behaviour of others. Negotiating individuals decide their actions through a recursive process of reciprocal observation, thereby reducing the possibility of free-riding. Evolutionary games with response rules have shown that infinitely many forms of the rule can be evolutionarily stable simultaneously, unless there is variation in individual quality. This potentially restricts the conditions under which negotiation could maintain cooperation. Organisms interact with one another in a noisy world in which cooperative effort and the assessment of effort may be subject to error. Here, we show that such noise can make the number of evolutionarily stable rules finite, even without quality variation, and so noise could help maintain cooperative behaviour. We ...