This study investigates the stability of cooperative policies in a minimal multi-agent environment under resource scarcity. We construct a stochastic environment with heterogeneous agents competing for food resources and evaluate cooperation using voluntary transfer events (GVF). A deviation-based stability test is applied by switching one cooperative agent to a non-cooperative policy while keeping all other parameters fixed. Results demonstrate that cooperative regimes remain stable in abundance but exhibit phase-sensitive degradation under increasing scarcity. Robustness analysis (R=200 repetitions) confirms that unilateral deviation reduces aggregate survival and cumulative reward in scarcity regimes (σ ≤ 0.65). The repository contains full source code and reproducible results for version v1.0.
Oleg Maynych (Thu,) studied this question.