Endogenous Neighborhood Selection and the Attainment of Cooperation in a Spatial Prisoner's Dilemma Game

There is a large literature in economics and elsewhere on the emergence and evolution of cooperation in the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. Recently this literature has expanded to include cooperation in spatial prisoner dilemma games where agents play only with local neighbors in a specified geography. In this paper we explore how the ability of agents to move and choose new locations and new neighbors influences the emergence of cooperation. First, we explore the dynamics of cooperation by investigating agent strategies that yield Markov transition probabilities. We show how different agent strategies yield different Markov chains which generate different asymptotic behaviors in regard to the attainment of cooperation. Second, we investigate how agent movement affects the attainment of cooperation in various spatial networks using agent based simulations.