Related papers: The edge of neutral evolution in social dilemmas
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…
The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…
The evolution of cooperation has been a perennial problem for evolutionary biology because cooperation is undermined by selfish cheaters (or "free riders") that profit from cooperators but do not invest any resources themselves. In a purely…
Extortion strategies can dominate any opponent in an iterated prisoner's dilemma game. But if players are able to adopt the strategies performing better, extortion becomes widespread and evolutionary unstable. It may sometimes act as a…
Cooperation among unrelated individuals is frequently observed in social groups when their members combine efforts and resources to obtain a shared benefit that is unachievable by an individual alone. However, understanding why cooperation…
We study the evolutionary dynamics of the prisoner's dilemma game in which cooperators and defectors interact with another actor type called exiters. Rather than being exploited by defectors, exiters exit the game in favour of a small…
Human society and natural environment form a complex giant ecosystem, where human activities not only lead to the change of environmental states, but also react to them. By using collective-risk social dilemma game, some studies have…
The complete cooperation and the complete defection are two typical strategies considered in evolutionary games in many previous works. However, in real life, strategies of individuals are full of variety rather than only two complete ones.…
In human societies the probability of strategy adoption from a given person may be affected by the personal features. Now we investigate how an artificially imposed restricted ability to reproduce, overruling ones fitness, affects an…
A fundamental problem in the fields of population genetics, evolution, and community ecology, is the fate of a single mutant, or invader, introduced in a finite population of wild types. For a fixed-size community of $N$ individuals, with…
Spatial structure is one of the simplest and most studied ecological factors that affect the evolution of cooperation. It has been shown that spatial reciprocity promotes cooperation due to the formation of cooperative clusters, which…
The n-person Prisoner's Dilemma is a widely used model for populations where individuals interact in groups. The evolutionary stability of populations has been analysed in the literature for the case where mutations in the population may be…
The stable cooperation ratio of spatial evolutionary games has been widely studied using simulations or approximate analysis methods. However, sometimes such ``stable'' cooperation ratios obtained via approximate methods might not be…
Cooperation is ubiquitous across all levels of biological systems ranging from microbial communities to human societies. It, however, seemingly contradicts the evolutionary theory, since cooperators are exploited by free-riders and thus are…
Genetic drift is stochastic fluctuations of alleles frequencies in a population due to sampling effects. We consider a model of drift in an equilibrium population, with high mutation rates: few functional mutations per generation. Such…
The pursuit of highest payoffs in evolutionary social dilemmas is risky and sometimes inferior to conformity. Choosing the most common strategy within the interaction range is safer because it ensures that the payoff of an individual will…
Recent microbial experiments suggest that enhanced genetic drift at the frontier of a two-dimensional range expansion can cause genetic sectoring patterns with fractal domain boundaries. Here, we propose and analyze a simple model of…
Punishment and partner switching are two well-studied mechanisms that support the evolution of cooperation. Observation of human behaviour suggests that the extent to which punishment is adopted depends on the usage of alternative…
Cooperation is a key driver of human social progress. Studies of the evolution of cooperation typically assume a deterministic outcome for social interactions. But in real-world social interactions, interaction outcomes are often subject to…
In spatial evolutionary games the fitness of each individual is traditionally determined by the payoffs it obtains upon playing the game with its neighbors. Since defection yields the highest individual benefits, the outlook for cooperators…