Competitive helping increases with the size of biological markets and invades defection

Cooperation between unrelated individuals remains a puzzle in evolutionary biology. Recent work indicates that partner choice can select for high levels of helping. More generally, helping can be seen as but one strategy used to compete for partners within a broader biological market, yet giving within such markets has received little mathematical investigation. In the present model, individuals help others to attract attention from them and thus receive a larger share of any help actively or passively provided by those others. The evolutionarily stable level of helping increases with the size of the biological market and the degree of partner choice. Furthermore, if individuals passively produce some no-cost help to partners, competitive helping can then invade populations of non-helpers because helpers directly benefit from increasing their access to potential partners. This framework of competitive helping demonstrates how high helping can be achieved and why different populations may differ in helping levels.

► Competition for social partners results in organisms competing to help others.
► The more freedom there is to choose partners, the more helping there will be.
► Big groups will have a larger “market for partners” and thus more competitive helping.
► Competing to help others can payoff, even when no one else actively helps.