Ownership and Trade in Spatial Evolutionary Memetic Games

In this paper we consider several strategies to compete in a spatial version of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD). The cell interaction is modeled by a two-dimensional square lattice, where each cell only locally interacts with its neighbors. Cell actions are public and therefore can be imitated by neighbors. The main contribution of the paper is the framework for the memetic analysis of the population evolution in this extended version of the spatial prisoner’s dilemma. Among the classical strategies, cooperate (C) and defect (D), we consider two other strategies based on the property of resources: Possession (P), as the right to possess what one owns, and Trade (T), as the right to buy and sell ownership. This work also includes a set of simulation results showing how ownership and trade emerge from anarchy, as evolutionary stable strategies, to enable the peaceful resolution of property conflicts under certain environment conditions.