A re-examination of Hamilton’s rule - with applications to games of cooperation

Abstract

We build and extend on research on the evolution of co-operation in games with continuous strategies, by analyzing species where individuals are familiar with each others’behavioral inclinations and adapt their own behavior accordingly. In a model where altruistic or spiteful preferences, rather than behaviors, are selected, we show that preference selection leads to behaviorally di¤erent predictions than strategy selection in two large classes of games. We illustrate our general results by way of application to certain games of cooperation. We show how preference selection may lead to more or less co-operation than under strategy selection, and that the magnitude of the deviation in the predicted behaviors depends on the specifics of the game.