The impact of group reputation in multiagent environments

Start Page
1224
End Page
1231
Article Number
1688449
Citation
IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2006)
Contribution to Conference
IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2006)  
Publisher DOI
10.1109/CEC.2006.1688449
This paper presents results from extensive simulation studies on the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Two models were implemented: a nongroup model in order to study fundamental principles of cooperation and a model to imitate ethnocentrism. Some extensions of Axelrod's elementary model implemented individual reputation. We furthermore introduced group reputation to provide a more realistic scenario. In an environment with group reputation the behavior of one agent will affect the reputation of the whole group and vice-versa. While kind agents (e. g. those with a cooperative behavior) lose reputation when being in a group, in which defective strategies are more common, agents with defective behavior on the other hand benefit from a group with more cooperative strategies. We demonstrate that group reputation decreases cooperation with the in-group and increases cooperation with the out-group.