Evolutionary prisoner's dilemma games with optional participation

Competition among cooperators, defectors, and loners is studied in an evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game with optional participation. Loners are risk averse i.e. unwilling to participate and rather rely on small but fixed earnings. This results in a rock-scissors-paper type cyclic dominance of the three strategies. The players are located either on square lattices or random regular graphs with the same connectivity. Occasionally, every player reassesses its strategy by sampling the payoffs in its neighborhood. The loner strategy efficiently prevents successful spreading of selfish, defective behavior and avoids deadlocks in states of mutual defection. On square lattices, Monte Carlo simulations reveal self-organizing patterns driven by the cyclic dominance, whereas on random regular graphs different types of oscillatory behavior are observed: the temptation to defect determines whether damped, periodic or increasing oscillations occur. These results are compared to predictions by pair approximation. Although pair approximation is incapable of distinguishing the two scenarios because of the equal connectivity, the average frequencies as well as the oscillations on random regular graphs are well reproduced.