Promoting Cooperation through External Interference

The problem of promoting the evolution of cooperativebehaviour within populations of self-regarding individualshas been intensively investigated across diverse fields of be-havioural, social and computational sciences (Nowak, 2006;Perc et al., 2017). In most studies, cooperation is assumed toemerge from the combined actions of participating individ-uals within the populations, without taking into account thepossibility of external interference and how it can be per-formed in a cost-efficient way. However, in many scenar-ios, cooperative behaviours are advocated and promoted byan exogenous decision maker, who is not part of the sys-tem (e.g. the United Nation interferes in political systemsfor conflict resolution or the World Wildlife Fund organ-isation interferes in ecosystems to maintain biodiversity).Thus, a new set of heuristics capable of engineering a de-sired collective behaviour in a self-organised multiagent sys-tem is required. Here we summarize our recent works tobridge this gap, in which we employ theoretical analysis andcomputer simulations based on evolutionary game theory(Nowak, 2006), to study cost-efficient interference strate-gies for enhancing cooperation in the context of cooperationdilemma games, for both well-mixed (Han and Tran-Thanh,2018) and square-lattice structured populations (Han et al.,2018)