The Integration of Defectors in a Cooperative Setting

This paper describes a study of the robustness of cooperative conventions. We observe the effect of the invasion of non-cooperating subjects into a community adopting a cooperative convention. The convention is described by an indefinitely repeated prisoner-dilemma game. We check the effects on the robustness of the cooperating convention of two characteristics of the game, namely the size of the prisonner-dilemma groups and the "intelligence" of the players. The relevance for real-world problems is considered. We find that the "intelligence" of the players plays a crucial role in the way players learn to cooperate. The simulation program is written in SWARM (Java version).